PLS York Plays 2025 at the University of Toronto

If you’re reading this, it likely means you have expressed interest in contributing a performance to the PLS York Plays 2025 at the University of Toronto! For a much fuller explanation of everything you read here, please watch the PLS York Plays 2025 intro video (click here).

For a handy summary of the York Plays, consult the Broadview Anthology of Medieval Drama (click here). You can find 27 of the plays in Fitzgerald’s 2018 The York Corpus Christi Play: Selected Pageants — and the Davidson edition of the original Middle English texts here.

To see prior work by PLS, check out our website (click here).

DATE: We are now aiming for a performance date of JUNE 6-8, 2025.  After a day of collaborative workthroughs and rehearsals, the performances will likely run from 6:30am to midnight on Sat 7 June (rain date Sun 8 June); all participating teams will need to be present and available on the University of Toronto campus for the full three days. If you joined up before that updated date was set, please let me know at matthew.sergi@utoronto.ca whether June 6-8 works for you.

WAGON STAGES: We lost our iconic wagon stages in a fire last summer, but we are about to begin scrambling to replace them — expect the mobile stages for 2025 to be lighter-weight and simpler than what we’ve had in prior years (and be warned that, if funding fails, we may have to do without wagons entirely). Our goal is to have 5 mobile stages in play, which will continually cycle around 4 performance stations, so that each play repeats four times in succession before passing its stage to the next group.

We’ll provide the performance spaces and publicity here in Toronto—and, as far as we can, the stages. 

As you likely already know, PLS’s iconic pageant wagon stages were destroyed in a fire last summer: on our end, we’ll apply for funding to have some kind of new mobile stages (i.e., stages that can be pushed, pulled, or driven from station to station) in play by 2025, but if those efforts fail, know that this run of the York plays may have to be more bare-bones than prior ones have been (in the worst-case scenario, we’d still process from station to station, but may not be able to drag stages with us, and may do most of our playing at ground-level).  If we do get mobile stages by 2025 (and I think we will: our funding chances look good at the moment!) then they’ll still be lighter-weight, more temporary constructions than in prior years, which means all participating groups will have to take a relatively minimalist (or at least portable-ist) approach to design, attaching as much business as possible to costumes, fabric backdrops, or portable objects, ideally using the bodies of actors to create a mise-en-scène.

Each university or college group is responsible for funding its own production costs beyond that, including costumes, props, set dressing, remuneration of collaborators, travel, and lodging—though for lodging we’ll try our best to pre-arrange group discounts in University of Toronto housing.  Hopefully I’m getting in touch with you well ahead of any funding application deadlines.  For local arts groups not affiliated with a college or university, we may be able to build some (probably small) amount of your production costs into our own funding applications here—let’s start those conversations now. 

IDEA 1: Splice Shorter Plays

The texts of the 47 surviving York plays create some serious issues with uneven run-times — we must assume that the medieval producers had their own ways of managing run-times, but we don’t know how they did it, so it’s up to us in the present-day to try out different solutions each time we mount the plays. For the 2025 run, let’s combine 27 of the shorter York plays into pairs (plus one triad), treating each of those combinations as one single play—there is certainly historical precedent for this, and doing so makes the length of each play far more consistent (and thus much easier to time for simultaneous performance stations).  For production purposes, that brings the number of plays from 47 to 33:

IDEA 2: Replace Lost Material

The 33-play list above goes a long way toward evening out run-times, but it still leaves gaps. Conveniently enough, many of those gaps align with lost material we know to be missing from the surviving manuscript—whether because a page is physically missing or because the summaries/lists of play content in earlier records refer to scenes the surviving texts leave out. The plays that run short also often include cues for music, sometimes not even specifying the song.

So let’s use participant-generated content to replace some of the material that is missing from the surviving York manuscript—that is, let’s invite the production teams who have been assigned shorter texts to create new dialogue and action, loosely and creatively organized around whatever medieval material seems to have been lost, and to insert it into the gaps (or music cues) in the existing text, until they reach a run-time equal to adjacent plays. Nicely, this idea allows us to both make the medieval texts our own and be rigorously historical (because we are filling in gaps with content we know to have been lost from the medieval source).

With that idea in mind, I can assign each of the 33 plays a set run time: each production team must, within that time, perform all the words on the surviving page, in order, and then use their new content to fill out any remaining time.

IDEA 3: Each Group Brings Two Plays

Each of medieval York’s participating guilds claimed a different play for their own. But even with our condensed and evened-out list of 33 plays, we are not going to be able to recruit 33 different groups to participate: to try that for a 2025 invitational event would either fail entirely or create an atmosphere of strained, rushed, forced collaboration—quite the opposite of the community-oriented feel in which the medieval plays seem to have developed, and which is certainly necessary in order to make them enjoyable for players and spectators.

So let’s recruit 16 groups and assign each group two of the items on the list above.  Even when each of us takes on two short plays, the total play assignment is still only 650-955 lines, about 45-50 minutes of content. That way, each team gets to work on a meaty enough production to be worth the effort and the trip, each team generates a production that can stand alone as a performance, which they can show on its own, if they wish, before bringing it to York 2025, and each team, because its two showings will be spaced across the long performance day, will be more engaged in fellow teams’ productions.

I generated the list of play-pairings below by pairing plays with similar cast sizes (so that the same cast can do both plays), by evening out the number of lines assigned across the 16 groups, by making sure each team’s assigned plays have enough time between them that one cast can do both (with a break in between), and by pairing thematically coherent or resonant plays.

The team assignments below are, currently, only suggestions, based primary on requests that participating groups have made so far. If you have been assigned to a play-pair, please let me know at matthew.sergi@utoronto.ca whether that assignment works for you; if you don’t like your assignment, or if you are currently unassigned, please let me know by email what unassigned play-pairs you would prefer.