Illinois Troupe Performs in the York Plays 2025 at the University of Toronto

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A scene from *The Road to Calvary*

Our medieval acting troupe of Illinois students, faculty, staff, and alumni participated in an epic production of the Corpus Christi Cycle at the University of Toronto on June 7th. Performing annually in the English city of York from the 13th to the 16th centuries, guilds staged Christian history from Creation to the Last Judgment over the course of one long summer day, beginning at dawn and ending at midnight. In Toronto, we joined 16 other groups from all over  North America to re-enact all 50 plays, each of which was performed on wagons pulled through the campus and staged at three different sites. 

Medieval theater was street theater, open-air theater without walls -- requiring performers to corral their audiences, engage them directly, and to occupy space with bold physical and vocal choices.  Our troupe was entrusted with two of the most elaborate of these short Middle English plays, The Entry into Jerusalem (originally performed by the guild of skinners, who supplied the donkey's hide) and The Road to Calvary (assigned to the guild of sheep-shearers).  Both of these processional pageants fully integrated the dramatic action with audience involvement and emphasized the immediacy of medieval theater as an always-contemporary performance practice. Although not clustered together in the production, these two plays are mirror images and provided opportunities for linking the festive entry of Jesus to its liturgical inverse, the journey toward crucifixion. An imaginative reconstruction of Calvary's missing manuscript folio was devised by the cast in rehearsal, featuring the 15th-century "Coventry Carol" as well as a new hymn, "Open My Eyes," written  by Miriam Endersby (b. 1999), with music composed by Kristina Arakelyan (b. 1994),  commissioned by Multitude of Voyces to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2022.