Note: The following contains spoilers for “A League of Their Own.”
Honoring Penny Marshall’s 1992 film, Prime Video’s new “A League of Their Own” series replicates the movie’s dual narrative in a new way. Carson Shaw (Abbi Jacobson) and Max Chapman (Chanté Adams) do not share the bond of sisterhood like the original film’s Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis) and Kit Keller (Lori Petty), but their love of baseball brings them together in the show and allows them to connect over their shared queer identities.
Carson Shaw haphazardly catches her train to tryouts, leaving behind her household and in some ways, her marriage to Charlie Shaw (Patrick J. Adams), though he has not yet returned from war. On this new adventure, she discovers not only a fierce love for her baseball team and the drive to win, but also women who like other women.
“Carson’s storyline is the one that leads us into the side of the show that focuses on the American Girl’s Professional Baseball League and she is going through a major transformative moment in her life and sort of figuring out her sexuality,” Jacobson said. “She’s really run away from a lot of her life into this new world of baseball and a lot of new women and is just figuring herself out.”
Carson’s narrative counterpart Maxine (“Max” for short) Chapman (Chanté Adams) desperately wants to play baseball, whether it be through the AAGBPL, which won’t accept Black women, or on a Black baseball team. Just as Carson dreads telling her husband that she really loves playing baseball, Max battles her mother Toni’s dislike of her pursuit of baseball.
“[Toni] represents a parent’s fear about letting your child go and letting your child grow into who they actually are, as opposed to who you perceive them to be,” said Saidah Arrika Ekulona, who plays Max’s mother Toni Chapman. “And even if it’s not in the direction or the journey that you set up for them, just letting go period. Parenthood seems to be hard. I mean, I’m not a parent, but from this. I was like, ‘Wow, no joke’”.
Unlike Carson, who has been heterosexually married up until her meeting Greta Gill (D’Arcy Carden), Max has known she likes women for awhile now. She hides it from her mother, but her mother knows deep down that Max will never have a husband.
“I do think that Toni recognizes that Max is probably gay, and not your typical girl. Because of Toni’s experience with Bert,” Ekulona said. “She becomes a bit more afraid that Max might turn into Bert or where is this going to go along with the fact that it’s outside of what Tony has set up for Max to do in her future.”
Toni hopes that Max will take over her salon and beauty parlor business one day. She doesn’t want her daughter to turn out like her sister Bertie, who skews more masculine and identifies as Uncle Bert. Bert lives in Rockford, but Toni hardly ever communicates with Bert, who she calls an invert.
“Especially with the baseball thing,” Ekulona continued Toni’s line of thought. “‘I can’t control that, I can control this,’ follow this and then, ‘okay, you can hide yourself a little bit more’ because that’s what she says to Bert. She had said, ‘If you just held on and just hid yourself a little bit more,’ but Bert left, and so I think also Toni feels abandoned by Bert and all of those feelings are mixed up into this with Max like, ‘Ah, you can’t leave me, not like this. You’ve gotta follow this and then you can grow’ And it doesn’t work.”
Toni thinks that Max can escape getting married to a man if she runs her own business, but in the end, Max achieves her dream of playing baseball on an all-Black baseball team, and she becomes the second woman on it.
“It’s very realistic because that’s exactly what happened,” said Chanté Adams, who portrays Max. “Black women were not allowed to play in the All American League. And so they had to figure out their own way, and there wasn’t necessarily a league for Black women either.”
Carson also lives out her dream, moving from catcher to coach of the Rockford Peaches.
“She grounds herself through figuring out her confidence, and I think she does so in really realizing her queerness,” Jacobson said. “She becomes a very unlikely leader. Up against the parallel storyline of Chanté’s character Max, both of them are really going through that moment. We’re showing this moment in both of their lives because they’re both really coming into and owning their queerness side by side in very similar and different ways, and that was really exciting to like hinge back and forth between.”
In terms of the characters’ representation of diversity, Abbi Jacobson, who co-created the series alongside Will Graham, shouted out their consultant Maybelle Blair who played in the AAGPBL. Blair came out at the age of 95 years old at the Tribeca premiere of Prime Video’s show.
“She’s 95 and when she was in the American Girls League, that was a very long time ago. To think she felt like she had to be hidden — that’s a long time,” Jacobson said. “So to get to have and create that space on screen, have these characters get to talk about the way they’re feeling, their nerves about it, that is so important for people to see. I didn’t see that when I was a kid. Those are some of my favorite scenes.”
Carson and Max’s stories intertwine from the start of the series when Max sees Carson experience queer love for the first time. The thread that ties them together from that moment leads to their forming a friendship, which allows them to have a conversation about queerness.
“As an actor and as an artist, it’s really beautiful [to play these characters], it’s a beautiful experience. And I feel like we’re honoring the people who came before us,” Adams said. “Some of them are still alive, but a lot of them aren’t, and their stories weren’t able to be told while they were around. So I think it’s really important for us to put these type of people and these conversations on display for the next generation so that they can know that they’re not alone and that people existed. We’ve been around since the beginning of time.”
Up against the parallel storyline of Chanté’s character Max, both of them are really going through that moment. “I think we’re showing this moment in both of their lives because they’re both really coming into and owning their queerness side by side in very similar and different ways, and that was really exciting to like hinge back and forth between.”
“A League of Their Own” is streaming on Prime Video.