Yep.  It’s a day of religious plays, most of them focused on Jesus and Mary. Our casts will include staunch atheists, devout believers (in multiple religions), and a whole lot of in between.  Some of our participating groups are faith-based.  Some are not.

These plays were never meant to convert or convince — they build from stories that local medieval communities already knew and frequently retold.  Those communities were culturally Catholic.  Many players and spectators were hardly devout, just there for the spectacle; some were deeply pious; some were skeptics and non-believers with various levels of visibility; but nearly everyone in attendance grew up with a given set of Catholic stories and rituals, for better and worse.

For better and worse, present-day festival-going communities do not share any givens.  Some of our spectators in 2025 will consider the religious material in our plays to be sacred, and may sometimes be unsettled by playfully medieval approaches to it.  Others may automatically associate the same material with histories of oppression (many of which had not yet happened when these plays were written down) and want to shut the whole thing out, if not down.

Much of what you now probably take for granted — whoever you are — about the meaning and impact of words like “Bible,” “Jesus,” “church,” or “sin” is probably a relatively modern invention, whatever high school classes or podcasts may have told you. The medieval meanings of those words give a lot more room than you’d probably expect to perspectives that now might register as non-religious, even sacrilegious.  Religion has changed a lot over the past five centuries.

When the General Manager of the York Plays, Matt Sergi, also teaches courses in early English religious drama at the U of T. He requires his students to watch his video lecture on how the very idea of religion has changed in English-speaking cultures since the sixteenth century (click here if you want to watch!), offering a model for why early playmakers’ depiction of sacred material differs from what present-day audiences might expect — and how to make sense of them now.

Most twenty-first-century folks are used to a taken-for-granted idea of what is appropriate material for theatres — while depicting religious subjects is usually inappropriate outside of religious spaces.  It’s modern habits that make sacredness and theatre seem like opposites, maybe robbing both of something vital. The York Plays came before all that: they get into the guts of existence and personal belief, right there in outdoor public spaces.  They don’t restrict dramatic art to “appropriate” stories about individuals, their private 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?
how does my human body connect to
the cosmic, the universal?

When these plays were written down, there were no theatres in England yet.  There were no “secular” cultural spaces where spiritual and religious stories and ideas were off-limits.  Bible stories 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 to allow their faith to infuse their performance in real ways, as unabashedly as they may wish.  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.

There are many gaps in the sole surviving copy of the York Plays: missing lines, pages, even whole plays.  We’ve challenged all our participants, who bring with them a wild variety of beliefs and perspectives, to fill those gaps with material that feels spiritually meaningful to them, now. They’ll perform those gap-fillers alongside the original fifteenth-century content of the York Plays that does survive, which they will sometimes translate into updated language, but will otherwise leave untouched (except antisemitic lines, below).

At York 2025, there will be all kinds of holy play, all kinds of spiritualities, religious and otherwise, shamelessly on display. None of us know what the final amalgam will look like. But one thing is for sure: it will not be like the theatre — or religion — that you’re used to.