A League of Their Own’s Cast and Creators on Why the Show’s Groundbreaking Representation Was “Only Possible Right Now”
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The post A League of Their Own’s Cast and Creators on Why the Show’s Groundbreaking Representation Was “Only Possible Right Now” appeared first on Consequence.
[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for A League of Their Own, Season 1 Episode 6, “Stealing Home.”]
As A League of Their Own co-creator/star Abbi Jacobson tells Consequence, the original film which inspired her new Amazon Prime Video series “is iconic and important to all of us. It’s just people’s favorite movie. So the film doesn’t need to be remade — and we were really focused on telling the stories that were not told in the film for whatever reason.”
Those reasons might include, in Jacobson’s words, “the limitations of what stories people were telling in 1992.” For a lot of things have changed between 1992 and 2022, but here’s a big one: Jacobson feels pretty sure that the adaptation’s groundbreaking approach to LGBTQ+ representation could only happen today: “I think a lot of shows have one queer character, and this show has a wide range of characters queer in all different kinds of ways, in incredibly different kinds of ways. I think that that felt only possible right now,” she says.
“They Expanded the Lens”
Streaming now on Prime Video, A League of Their Own (like the film before it) is based on the true stories of women who played in the 1943 inaugural season of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. But while the first season spotlights new Rockford Peaches catcher Carson Shaw (Jacobson)’s journey, Jacobson and co-creator Will Graham were able to use these eight episodes to also tell stories about a diverse range of backgrounds and points of view — including that of people of color.
Central to this approach is the character of Max (Chantè Adams), a Black woman who tries to try out for the League — even after being rejected on the basis of her skin color, the show continues to follow her efforts to find a team that will accept her.
“When I got the audition, I was a little confused because I don’t remember women who looked like me being a core part of the film — we all remember that one iconic scene where the Black woman throws the baseball back to Geena Davis — but even still,” Adams says. “But, once I read the script I was like, okay we’re uncovering something different here and this could be really special… Just being given the opportunity to possibly shed light on their stories which the world does not hear as often as we should.”
The character of Max was inspired by three real women who played in the Negro Leagues during this time — Toni Stone, Mamie Johnson, and Connie Morgan. Desta Tedros, one of the show’s writers and executive producers, observes that even though the stories of these women are set in such a specific place and time, “I’m a Black queer woman, and their stories are, in a lot of ways, my stories still. I think there’s a timeliness and a timelessness to it.”
A League of Their Own (Prime Video)
Tedros also notes the impact of stories shared by people including real-life player Maybelle Blair, who “is and was queer and had to navigate living that. When she talked about the league, she was like, ‘It was a party.’ The celebration of the joy that we found in a lot of the stories was surprising and exciting for me.”
Field agrees. “Just knowing from Maybelle and some of the original players that this was a part of their experience — the fear that they felt, but also the thrill that they felt, doing this thing that they loved for the first time, something that they were so good at… I think that this show captures that really well,” says Field. “The confidence I imagine they felt in this new environment, being willing and able and in some cases ready to step into this part of this identity, if only for a short period of time — I was really excited when I read that.”
As Tedros says, “Queer women have always played sports, in general and in Maybelle, talking to the league historian, there were a lot of queer women — also a large number of straight women.” Because of this research, proving that queer people were a big part of the league makeup, “we could step into what really was the story. Sometimes it’s like ‘Oh, you’re adding this piece,’ but I’m like, ‘That is the piece — that is a part of it.'”
Learning from the real former players made a huge difference, Graham says, “because there was so much in those stories that the problem immediately became ‘Okay, what do we do first?’ In listening to Maybelle and dozens of other players that we talked to, some of who were queer and some of who weren’t, the stories kind of told us what it wanted to be and we just had to not screw it up. Hopefully, we didn’t.”
“I like that [the writers] didn’t hold back — they really opened it up, they expanded the lens, they pulled back the curtain,” says D’Arcy Carden, who plays first baseman (and Carson’s love interest) Greta. “We really get to know this big group of people and get to follow them — it was thrilling to be a part of it, but also watching it, I was so invested in everybody’s story.”
The emphasis on inclusion also stretches to race, for both the show’s Black and Latinx characters. “We don’t have that kind of privilege with American content, of what Latinos were up to in any point of history, until now,” co-star Roberta Colindrez says. “The way that Latino people were included in the league was actually in a weird, problematic way, but it changed the lives of these women and it gave them access to things that a lot of people from the same demographics didn’t have access to. So it was very moving and powerful, and confusing, and it’s cool to explore these stories.”
“It Was So Empowering”
A League of Their Own (Prime Video)
A major dramatic element of the first season is The Office, a secret gay bar in Rockford that was actually based on a real bar from Rockford, Illinois called The Office. “Max and Carson are both finding their teams on the field and both of our storylines are so parallel and why I think they’re so linked is their queer journey to find their queer community,” says Jacobson.
So as Max embraces the community she discovers at a house party, Carson and her fellow teammates discover The Office. “We’re both stepping into these worlds and it’s so exciting because I think they’re both sort of cracked open and realizing that this world is so much bigger and ‘I’m not alone in who I am, there are other people like me,'” continues Jacobson. “To shoot both of those sequences just opened up the scope of the period-ness. I don’t think you usually see period pieces with those environments and characters and filling the space. It was really pretty special.”
“I love gay bars and queer communities and I’ve always been interested in the history of the gay bar,” says Graham. “Whenever you go to a place and you’re like, ‘There are not queer people here,’ they’re wrong. There’s always a place, there are always people, there’s always a space. We wanted to tell that story of people finding a community and finding a place and why that’s so important. Why is it so important for Carson, Abbi’s character, to be able to dance with the woman that she’s in love with there? It’s something that’s important to all of us.”
The production team was able to visit the original Rockford version of The Office, and when it came time to shoot in the show’s recreation, Graham says that “I got chills on set that day because the art department had carved the names of people into the tables, like ‘Ruth + Nancy.’ You could feel the voices of the ancestors of our community, people who fought to get to the place that we are now and still fighting. That’s part of what we’re trying to channel in that sequence and in the show.”
Co-star Melanie Field, who plays heavy-hitting Jo, also experienced chills the day she, Carden, and Jacobson shot Jo, Greta, and Carson’s dramatic arrival at The Office. “They were like, ‘It’s going to be in slo-mo.’ And I remember [D’Arcy] and Abbi in the front and me in the back with my cigarette, and I felt like I imagine Jo must have felt at that time — ‘This is my world, I own it.’ It was so empowering.”
A League of Their Own (Prime Video)
Confirms Carden to Field, “It comes across in that scene. You are so cool in that scene. It worked so well.” She also mentions another scene that was really special to her: “The scene in the Peaches house where we were getting ready to go to the gay bar and talking you into it, that one felt really exciting too — I felt that excitement and thrill that these characters had. I think it’s easy as an actor to feed into that.”
While The Office is introduced as a haven for the show’s queer women, things take a tragic turn in Episode 6, “Stealing Home,” when a police raid leads to severe beatings and arrests. “The end of that episode, as a queer person… queer or not, the way that that episode ends was very impactful for everyone that was shooting it, and pretty devastating,” says Jacobson.
However, the fate of The Office does not shut down the termination of these women to be themselves. “The show is so much about finding your team on and off the field, and I think that it just highlights that you could find it then, the same way that we find it now,” Tedros says. “Also, people are going to find it any place. I think that that is the story behind the queer bars and the queer communities, it’s a celebration. When people try to shut them down or restrain it, they came back — because that’s how important community is.”
“It’s a basic human need,” Graham says.
A League of Their Own Season 1 is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.
A League of Their Own’s Cast and Creators on Why the Show’s Groundbreaking Representation Was “Only Possible Right Now”
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