Imagine the medieval York Corpus Christi Plays: fifty short play scripts, each one based on a different Bible story (or on medieval “fanfic” of the Bible), each one produced and performed by a different craft guild (or other group), all on one day. Nearly every year, from 1376 to 1569, the playmakers of York put their plays on wagon stages and pulled them across the whole city, with each of the fifty plays repeating at each of twelve different stations, from sunrise well into the night. Their massive biblical drama focuses primarily on the lives of Jesus and his mother Mary, but the story extends all the way back to God’s creation of the universe, and continues forward to the Last Judgment.

On Saturday, June 7, 2025 (rain date Sunday, June 8), starting at 6:00am — and continuing past midnight — seventeen performance groups from across North America, organized and hosted by PLS and the CRRS, converged on Toronto to present all of the York Plays in medieval style, building from new editions of the text by Christina M. Fitzgerald. We repeated each play on replica wagon stages, across three performance stations, outdoors (no chairs!), at:

BURWASH QUAD
AT VICTORIA UNIVERSITY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
89-93 CHARLES STREET WEST
TORONTO, ON, CANADA M5S 1K6

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
(CLICK HERE FOR THE IMPORTANT INFORMATION WE SHARED AHEAD OF TIME)
PERFORMANCES SATURDAY JUNE 7, 2025, 6:00AM TO PAST MIDNIGHT, OUTDOORS

WITH ADDITIONAL WORKSHOPS, TALKS, AND DISCUSSION (FOR REGISTERED PARTICIPANTS ONLY)
ON SUNDAY JUNE 8, 2025, 10AM TO 6PM, INDOORS

Now that our performance is over (great job, everyone!), we’ll leave this site up for a while in case anyone has use for the resources we shared here. The pages linked here, of course, will often refer to the show as if it has not yet happened — they’re now added to the centuries-long archive of traces left behind by York Plays productions. In time, we’ll migrate all these pages over to plsplayers.com, but until then, enjoy! We are currently working on video footage of the event (thanks to the efforts of our amazing videographer, Dennis Jerz, and his assistant Tommy Nguyen), but there’s a LOT of footage from an event like this — we hope to have something shareable by video by fall 2025. If you’d like updates on the video footage, or anything else related to PLS productions, the best thing to do is to sign up for our email list.