Every group will follow the cardinal rule of our production: do the whole thing, no cuts, no skips. Any new wording a group chooses must correspond directly and reasonably to Fitzgerald’s text, word for word, sentence for sentence.

The words can be reordered within a sentence. Sometimes two words might be best translated as one, or one as two. But further afield than that is too far, and winds up losing the spirit of the exercise.

So, by way of example, a group might take "For this skill made I you this day, / My name to worship ay where" and update/translate it to:

- "I made you for this reason: to worship my name everywhere"

- "Just today, I created y’all. Here's why: y’all glorify what I stand for, across the world"

- "This day I created you. Because you can bear witness, the world over, to what 'Creator' means."

In each case above, every word in the sentence is derived from a word (or two) in the medieval English, in some reasonable way. Even in that last case, every word still corresponds reasonably to one or two words in the original (“to what ‘Creator’ means” = “My name,” as spoken by God). But in that case, the rationale for correspondence should be consistent within that particular group’s approach to their full play (perhaps this group’s take on Adam and Eve positions God’s role as Creator as the primary source of his authority). We’re not going to randomly stretch lines just to stretch them.

What we won’t do is adapt the lines too far away from the Fitzgerald text, by leaving out or adding too many words, or by ignoring obvious meanings of the original – say, "Yeah, I just made you, duh, so what?" – just ends up defeating the purpose of what we’re doing here and ends up a self-centered exercise.

The fourteenth- and fifteenth-century playmakers of York adapted stories from the Bible into dialogue that made sense to them. And some of that dialogue is antisemitic. And we’re definitely not gonna leave that dialogue as is. We’re not trying to wipe historical antisemitism from the record here — we’ll make resources available during the performance, including the Fitzgerald text itself, that will make the history fully clear — but live performance, especially a public performance that multiple passers-by might come to see without any context, is obviously the wrong medium for an initial confrontation with historical hate.

The York plays were composed by multiple hands, with multiple viewpoints. In some cases, “Jew(s)” appears in the dialogue simply to refer, without any negative judgment (and sometimes with a sense of kindness and inclusion) to the ethnic, cultural, and religious group -- Jesus and Mary certainly included -- among whom most of the biblical events happened. We’ll leave those in.

In other cases, “Jew(s)” is used, pejoratively and ahistorically, to refer only to the bad guys in the story, as though the good guys (Jesus, Mary, etc.) weren’t also Jews themselves. In those cases, our groups will choose either a more specific term that refers to a now-defunct subsect of the biblical-era Jewish community (perhaps “Pharisees” or “Sanhedrin”) or a more general term that gets more effectively at what is happening in the story (perhaps “persecutors,” “enemies,” or even “bad guys”).

And in other cases, “Jew(s)” is simply used full-on ignorantly, as a vague signifier of “anyone who doesn’t believe what Christians believe.” In those cases, the most accurate present-day translation IS usually “non-believer(s)” -- so we’ll use that, or some equivalent.

The York Plays’ ignorantly characterized Jews and Romans often swear by or pray to a made-up pantheon of gods, as though biblical-era Judaism was pantheistic (!); the most frequently mentioned god is “Mahound,” derived etymologically -- in an even more absurd turn -- from the name of the holy prophet of Islam, though it quite clearly cannot sensibly refer to the prophet in any of these cases. It is doubtful that York’s ignorant playmakers even knew that “Mahound” had ever had any historical reference specifically to Islam (compare to “punk”, used widely today without any knowledge of its homophobic etymology). Still, we’re not gonna use that term in our 2025 productions -- groups might opt to translate/update “Mahound” to a different “god” name that does not refer, even obscurely, to any religious beliefs present-day audiences might likely hold, preferably a fitting biblical-era or Roman one (perhaps “Moloch,” which Allen Ginsburg repurposed as the god of modernity’s dehumanization, would work; perhaps “Mammon” is a good choice too). Or, where the person swearing or praying was clearly a monotheist historically, groups might choose to translate/update “Mahound” simply to “God.”

Did we mention the original fifteenth-century manuscript is damaged? Sometimes a line is missing here or there. Sometimes a page is missing. Or multiple pages. Or whole plays. Sometimes, too, there is a cue that refers to information once taken for granted, but now lost (often a music cue will not specify the specific song).

So, whenever there is a gap or missing cue reference in the text, each group will fill it in with new material of their own devising, material that is meaningful, engaging, or interesting to that group -- impressionistic or anachronistic as it may sometimes be.

Each group got its play-cluster assignments in autumn 2023; our goal is for each group to have generated its new additions by autumn 2024, and certainly before its rehearsals begin — except where the group wants to generate new material by using devising techniques during the rehearsal process (in those cases, though, the devising process should start early!).

We’ll aim for each addition to be approximately the same size as what was lost (if one line is missing, we’ll only add one line back in). And above all, we’ll choose additions that will fill out, but not exceed, our assigned run times.

Because so many plays are happening at the same time, our groups will be rehearsing with timers. So as we prepare our texts ahead of rehearsal, we’ll keep these assigned run-times in mind:

Clusters 1-7, 9, and 32 should run 22 minutes each.

Cluster 8 should run 19 minutes. (Clusters 8 and 32 will thus be leaving a few minutes unused, so PLS can organize welcome speeches, blessings, and acknowledgements during those minutes).

Clusters 31, 33, and 34 should each run 27 minutes.

All other Clusters should run 25 minutes.

We don’t have to be perfectly exacting on timing… but we all have to try to be, as best as we can, by building timing concerns into our process from the beginning. If any group misses their target time by more than 2 minutes max, it will throw everyone else off pretty hard — so we’re going to do our best. Even if everybody keeps within their assigned run time, we already have a production that — when we add the assigned times above to a 5-minute transition after every play, with each play repeating three or four times, we get an 18 1/2 hour production — that is, from 6:30am to 12:30am — so we are going to keep things TIGHT!

That doesn’t mean we’re going to try and get everything exactly the same at every run – that never makes for good live performance! Instead, we’ll pay attention to run times in preparing our scripts and scores. Plays that keep running short in rehearsal should add flexible or expandable content (maybe a song or dance?) toward the end of their play, so that they can extend their action to fit into the available time. Plays that keep running long in rehearsal should set some of their opening dialogue in the transition period that follows the play prior to theirs -- so their action can begin while the various plays are switching from station to station, even before their full cast and stage has been set up. In rehearsal, we’ll have to practice again and again with timing, so that each group is ready to handle the unpredictable timing issues that will always arise in performance. So we’ll prepare our rehearsal texts with timing in mind. Above all, we will not use any set pieces, design elements, or effects that require any but the shortest, simplest set-up times, doable in a few seconds during pre-play transitions.

As we develop and rehearse, we’ll keep in contact with the PLS organizers regarding timing — so if our assigned run time isn’t working, we’ll work with PLS to figure out a solution ahead of time.

We will move our bodies in these plays! We will break a sweat!

We will be the opposite of “talking heads” -- in our plays, every body will constantly be engaged in evocative, living shape, pose, gesture, action, or movement, in order to draw, hold, and direct spectator focus strategically at all times.

(That includes bodies that don’t or can’t move in normative ways: every body in every play will be engaged in physical actions that challenge, and reveal the beauty, evocativeness, and playfulness of, that body.)

Our body shapes and movements need not be narratively justified -- bodies can and should also express in abstract, impressionistic, or impulsive ways! -- but they will stay engaged, even when in still tableau.

The York Plays include quite a few long speeches. We do not believe those speeches were delivered in plain stillness in the medieval period. In our productions, long speeches will be enlivened with physical action — whether it’s the speaker making heightened, expressionistic physical shapes to magnify their words, or fellow performers moving around the speaker, or some other creative way of continually embodying text in physical movement.

And we consider costumes and props, here, to be extensions of our bodies — our physical shaping and movement will also bring life to the inanimate objects on us or in our hands. Props and costumes can also move!

We will practice and strengthen our voices to be loud and big in order to carry across open, unpredictable outdoor spaces. We will rehearse outdoors where possible; when we can’t, we’ll try to recreate outdoor sounds in our rehearsal spaces.

We might opt to sing or chant some lines of dialogue, even if the source text doesn’t instruct us to. (If we have any strong singers or instrument-players in our casts, we definitely will use them.) And we'll yell if and when we have to -- better to be campy than inaudible.

We will abandon demands for subtlety and nuance in speech, expression, and characterization: we aren't on TV or in an indoor, miked theatre.

It’s not enough to complain that modern productions of medieval plays are anachronistically naturalistic or driven by realism: those modern modes are obviously a bad fit for medieval plays, but present-day players habituated into those modes need an alternative approach to replace what we’ve rejected! So we’re encouraging each of our groups, as part of its rehearsal process, to play around with a present-day non-naturalistic performance style of some kind (camp, mime, clown, kabuki, vaudeville, bollywood, commedia, pro wrestling, street theatre, agit prop, via negativa, whatever works best for each group!) in order to break televisual habits and discover a BIG AND LOUD style that feels true to us.

Our rehearsals, devising, and performances will make use of the porous timeliness of medieval play texts — that is, how the craft of these play texts is in shaping open spaces through which the “here and now” might be seen anew, rather than transporting us somewhere else. We’ll let the “here and now” flow into the medieval/biblical past, and vice versa, when it feels right to do so -- but only the RIGHT here and RIGHT now: not the constructed, delocalized "now" of global news, social media feeds, and news cycle headlines — all of which are distinctly modern constructions of time that would have baffled and distracted medieval players.

So: no gimmicks or cheap shots, no political or pop references that try to manufacture “relevance” and “significance”! No pre-determined historical thematics! (We’ll leave the “let’s keep this production interesting by setting it in the 1960s” approach to Shakespeare companies trying to justify yet another Midsummer). If new logics and stories drift into the pores of our plays, they will be our logics and stories, today, this moment; rather than creating a dominant thematic, they will appear (and then disappear) based on genuine impulse in rehearsal and performance. Our here and now is that of the real people on and around the stage, whose lived and situated experiences we will acknowledge and engage, in planned and ad libbed ways.

We will create vibrant production designs that are visible from all angles. We will make sure that any passer-by will be able to recognize what we’re doing at every point of performance, even from too far away to hear our words (even though our words will be loud!). While we’re not playing for any imagined photographic/televisual media, if anyone should snap a photo at any point in our plays, from any angle, the powerful shapes, images, and spatial composition of that still shot would communicate sharp, vibrantly clear emotions — in other words, for all the energy of our movement, if someone were to yell “freeze” at any moment, the result would look powerful and gorgeous.

We will discover and renew living, captivating shapes and movements with our bodies and performance materials that communicate their own spatial, visual, emotional, and kinetic messages. Our plays will generate a stream of moving, evocative visual tableaux that at times may be legible or iconographic, at times non-literal or abstract -- direct, transparent correspondence between visual display and narrative content need not be (and should not be) the only logic at work.

We will also use duplicates of a few shared hand props or costume pieces to create some visual throughlines across performances. We’re currently figuring out what those shared objects will be — more soon!

Medieval players were not aiming for the perfect repeatability that present-day commercial theater now takes for granted. Neither are we. We expect every performance to be different, maybe very different, every time; in fact, we’ll strive to discover something new with every run.

We’ll rehearse with dynamic staging rather than static blocking (for instance, cuing actors to try and accomplish tasks by making use of whatever happens to be available, rather than to hit precise marks).

Where we can, we’ll rehearse in varied locations (outdoors and in public ideally), to practice letting in real, inhabited playing spaces — as equal playing partners. We’ll prepare from the start for play spaces that are unsilent, unpredictable, and multidirectional. Rather than shutting out unplanned stimuli, we'll practice heightening our sensitivity to them and embracing unpredictables as a key element of play. And we’ll hone our improv skills to help make that happen.

And so, no taping out the rehearsal room: our actors will be able to step into any available space, of any size, ready to react and adapt to any configuration of spectator placement or environmental interruption that happens to arise. No fight calls either: our staging cannot be so exacting that it requires perfect repeatability to be physically safe; even staged violence will have to be flexible and adaptable, even if that means it’s less realistic).

We’re hoping to use reconstructed, medieval-style mobile wagon stages for York 2025, but aren’t currently sure whether we’ll be able to get them built (more news here soon). If we do, our medieval staging will make ample use of the platea — the flexible street-level area where audiences have gathered — as well as the stage; each playing station will be situated among very different local architecture and audience arrangements, spurring performers — who will not shut out the world around them — to find new ways of relating to their surroundings each time.

So: wagons or not — or if pouring rain or wildfire smoke or the next catastrophe drives us into an unexpected performance venue, we will jump into that new environment fully ready, and have no less fun as a result.

We will show up to each other’s performances, all of them, throughout the day, whenever we’re not ourselves performing. There will be hundreds of us directly involved with the various productions, as there were in the medieval period — we will BE a large portion of the crowds within which the York plays were meant to unfold.

And when we do, we will practice and foster unmannerly styles of medieval spectatorship. When we're spectating, we'll move around at will, we’ll retain our exuberant openness to play, and we'll make whatever supportive noises and gestures we feel a genuine impulse to make, so long as it contributes energy and attention to the play currently running: cheering on (or jeering?) our friends, booing the bad guys, oohing and aahing at impressive effects or feats, dancing or singing along with music we know; speaking our thoughts and reactions freely to fellow spectators. This is not a matter of providing canned sitcom-style responses; we will attend each other's plays as we might attend sporting events. If we see something onstage that reminds us of an experience we once shared with a fellow spectator, we will feel free to nudge that friend and say, at full voice, "JUST LIKE THAT TIME IN JERSEY, RIGHT?" As long as our attention stays substantially on the play being done, spectators' audibility and visibility will lend energy and authenticity to that performance.

That way, we’ll model medieval-style spectating for new audiences. Whether they’ve come to see a friend perform or have just wandered in off the street, our own behavior will show them it’s healthy, necessary, historically accurate, for them to wander in and out, become distracted, talk over us, miss key moments, fail to react as planned, and generally get in the way. We need to encourage and help our audiences to break out of the docile theater-going habits they’re accustomed to and then join us as visible, present, active playing partners.

And so we’ll build our rehearsals with those medieval-style spectators in mind, not counting on our audience to react as planned, but counting on them to surprise us.

If a moment in one of our plays calls for awed quiet, we need to figure out how to legitimately earn that awe – and figure out what to do in the moment if it doesn't go as we'd hoped, rather than blame the audience for not getting it.

Rather than “emoting” as actors, and rather than aiming for a pre-determined set of emotional marks to hit, we will practice ways to keep own senses, enjoyments, real feelings, and real spiritualities alive and available for audiences to encounter as we perform. (That includes any players involved in York 2025 who are believers, who currently and actively do hold the content of these plays sacred.)

We will create a community where performers and spectators feel welcomed and warm enough to genuinely feel and openly enjoy, rather than simulating feeling or enjoyment: medieval performance is for the performers’ feeling and enjoyment as much as it is for the spectators’!

Our production designs will involve tactile and experiential elements — elements that are there for the performers themselves to enjoy and inhabit. And we won't mime anything -- every object involved in our plays will be an actual object (though it may not be an realistically representative one). Using dynamic staging, we’ll build spatial cues by inviting actors to interact with and refer to the architecture of the real space surrounding them (which will change from station to station).

Nothing in our plays will require more than 90 seconds of set-up, which we’ll do during the transition between stations. If something goes wrong or awry with any technical aspects of our plays, or other plans, good! — now that awry-ness is part of the play.

Every actor will need to be extra hardcore about line memorization so that all of the unpredictables don’t throw us off — but if an unpredictable still causes one of us to lose track of our lines, our teammates will give a friendly midstream reminder: there’s no suspension of disbelief we have to worry about breaking here; our aim is to keep the energy, pace, and camaraderie alive.

We won't make use of large constructed setpieces (except where crosses, arks, ascensions, etc are truly necessary, which we'll pre-arrange with PLS). We will construct vibrant, rich, gorgeous stage pictures using only what the actors can wear and carry (costumes and hand props), rather than straining, substituting, or shoehorning in design elements that our present circumstances can’t afford or sustain.

Medieval players were not professional actors (for the most part, there was no such thing yet) but they were not amateurs either (“amateurism” is only imaginable in opposition to the profit-driven, de-localized, over-polished model of the professional actor in the first place). So do not expect any elementary school Christmas pageant style here: we will access that primordial place from before “talent” and “love” were separated — unprecious and unpolished don’t mean sloppy or underrehearsed: they mean practicing hard and coming with full presence, artistry, commitment, stakes, and virtuosity.

We’ll continue to engage fellow groups in ongoing discussion, sharing, and socialization, not only to keep thinking through the contours of upcoming productions, but also to form real bonds of friendship and networks of mutual support with each other: that is about the most historically accurate thing we can do in re-creating medieval guild drama. Many of us are already actual friends with each other; we’re going to spread the friendship and emerge from this a genuinely fraternal group, if only because that is precisely how our medieval predecessors did it (because they hadn’t yet forgotten the whole point of doing plays).

We’ll organize social gatherings in the months leading up to the production: sometimes Zoom parties, sometimes gatherings in Toronto — more on this soon.

We'll also push to represent a wide range of ages in our casting, as our medieval forbears certainly did (those plays produced by campus groups will not only involve undergrad actors!) -- and we'll encourage directors (especially those who are, in other lives, professors) to cast themselves, or otherwise involve their own bodies, and their own families where willing and available, in the mix.

Our plays are, obviously, religious. But religion has changed a lot over the past five centuries. Much of what you now probably take for granted — whoever you are — about the cultural meaning, impact, and domain of the words “Bible,” “Jesus,” “church,” or “sin” is probably a relatively modern invention. The medieval meanings of those words and ideas probably give a lot more room than you’d expect to perspectives that now might register as non-religious, even sacrilegious.

The opposition between the sacred and the playful, between the sacramental and the theatrical, is a modern (and often damaging) construction. The York plays get into the guts of existence and belief; they don’t restrict dramatic art to stories about individuals, their relationships, and their societies, but ask deep and universal questions, point blank: what is morality? how and why did life come to be? what happens after we die? There were no “secular” cultural spaces where spiritual and religious stories and ideas were off-limits or removed from play: religious stories and ideas were a common, public resource — all in the mix, all the time, in the air, at work, at home, on the street — and that made them more flexible, variable, and personalize-able than what most folks are now used to.

So we will encourage our participants of faith — faith which is now often habitually excluded from or silenced by the “secular” worlds of theatre and academia — to allow their faith to infuse their performance in real ways, as unabashedly as they may wish to. And we will encourage participants who are not believers, or whose faith does not typically connect with the content of these plays, to explore ways to infuse their own spirituality, whatever that means to them, into their performances. We’ve got room for it all.

In play, the holy can and must also be humorous; when something unplanned happens in rehearsal or performance that reveals humor in holiness, we’ll be open to that, and will sometimes keep it as part of future runs. Real laughter can be a vulnerable, joyous act of faith. Lazy secular humor that mocks the sacred, or that distances the present performance from real belief as something “back then,” will only produce deadly theatre.

Contrary to what modern TV/movie interpretations keep trying to convince us was true (click here for some examples!), medieval culture was not uniformly repressive or conforming or simplistic. In comparison to the present day, social and political power was significantly weaker and looser in the Middle Ages, which arguably afforded medieval people greater liberty than we have today (what was in law books or official policies did not correspond with what was enforced or experienced as closely as it now does). Medieval plays, too, afforded people liberties that may be harder to recognize now. In fact, staged faithfully, medieval plays can reveal just how constricting and repressive modern theater and its conventions are.

The fourth wall, for instance, is an artifact of the Renaissance proscenium stage that separates players from audiences, dramatic world from everyday world, fiction from reality. The York plays don’t need to “break the fourth wall” because they have no walls in the first place. There's no pretending we don't see each other, no sitting still for two hours in a cramped seat, no angry shushing over a cough or a candy wrapper -- habits of modern theater-going under the strong hand of commercialism.

The separation of serious drama from comedy as distinct genres or registers with their own etiquettes is another modern restriction we don’t need. Camp is our watchword: complete and total energetic commitment to the game, including to the fact that it is a game, that spills naturally into raw humor or raw vulnerability.

The challenge here is big: even though we might recognize all the conventions, standards, habits, and assumptions of modern theater-making, we can’t just reject them by force of will or vague intention -- they are simply baked too deep into us. That’s why we need to think through and talk through all these performance ideas ahead of time: to keep each other on our toes and prevent us from falling into the very habits that will deaden these plays.

Our plays are not historical relics in need of the intervention of a supposedly more free-thinking present day. Rather, they are time capsules ready to unleash a radically free and expressive mode of sacred play that can offer present-day playmakers and audience-goers, secular or religious, new ideas about freedom and expression. We will restore liberties, rather than just taking them.

And that’s why our productions will be GOOD. Not a nostalgic exercise in what was once good, not an academic experiment that simulates enjoyment, not a curated museum display case, not a wheezing apology for a misunderstood past, not a present-day pastiche of cheap parody and pop memes — but a really good and enjoyable and powerful playing through of play texts that are good and enjoyable and powerful, from dawn till midnight, for ourselves, our audiences, and each other.