PLEASE DONATE TO OUR WAGON REBUILD / FIRE RECOVERY:

PULL YOUR WEIGHT! (CLICK HERE)

PLS, one of the two producers of the York Plays 2025 project, is a Canadian non-profit company that sponsors performance-led scholarship into early plays, from the beginnings of medieval drama to as late as the middle of the seventeenth century.

For sixty years, PLS has been associated with the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies (CMS), and currently operates as an affiliate of the Centre for Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies. We offer a regular schedule of plays every year, sometimes touring across North America and Europe.

No one has ever staged all of the surviving York Plays, in order and on wagon stages, except for PLS. We built eleven wagons for our first production of the York Plays (this is our third!) in 1977 — and over time, as we expanded into large-scale play performances from other medieval locations, we became known most of all for those signature wagons, which, like the York plays themselves, took shape across generations of additions, embellishments, and stories in our community.

In the summer of 2022, a few months into the planning of York Plays 2025, all eleven of our wagons, along with nearly all of the other setpieces and constructions we had amassed over six decades of performance-led research, which altogether would be worth over $280,000 today, were destroyed in a fire at campus storage. All of us, but especially the company members who have been with us since the 1970s, were devastated.

The loss was covered by campus insurance, but only in part — insurance will cover only half of our massive loss. It will be enough to provide wagon stages for the York Plays 2025, just barely. We will have to recover and rebuild the rest over time, raising money and building anew, from performance to performance in the future.

Our current goal is to raise enough money to sponsor the rebuilding of ONE replica wagon stage (now valued at about $20,000) in time to use it for York Plays 2025. If you believe in what PLS does and want us to keep dragging our wagons from the past into the future, then we ask you — like a medieval wagon-putter! — to PULL YOUR WEIGHT by making a contribution to our wagon rebuild and fire recovery. Any amount will help!

If you are willing and able, please do make a tax-deductible donation to PLS through Canada Helps — and specify that you want your donation to go specifically to the wagon rebuild. Thank you!