Unruly Grandeur | The York Plays

Chelsea Cannon as the Angel Gabriel

Next weekend, the Cleveland-based company Unruly Grandeur will caravan to the University of Toronto to perform a brace of medieval mystery plays.

This weekend, they are presenting dress rehearsals out-of-doors in Lincoln Park. You can attend, and I recommend you should, today, Sunday, June 1 at 2:00 PM. A couple dozen of us braved to cooler temps to witness the event yesterday.

The York Corpus Christi Plays are a series of short scripts which, taken together, tell the story of Christ. Festival organizers describe these seven hundred or so year-old plays as “Bible fan-fic” as they depict moments from the Bible and expand upon them, often with great humor, and they are certainly still, after all these centuries, entertaining.

Those who performed these works then, and those who will be presenting them in Canada next weekend, would and will take all day to do so. There’s almost twenty companies participating who will cycle through all the plays, using wagons to cart their ensemble to three different locations across the university campus.

When you attend today, and I recommend you do, you will see just the two pieces produced by Unruly Grandeur, and it will only last an hour. The first, Joseph’s Troubles, plays like a mid-century sit-com. The hapless and no-longer-young Joseph (Stuart Hoffman) presses his young and pregnant spouse (Chennelle Bryant-Harris) to tell him who the father is.

Michael Montanus as King Herod

The second, Herod Antipas is a broad clown show with overt modern political imagery and honest-to-God red noses, in which Herod (Michael Montanus) interrogates a silent Jesus (Jailyn Sherell Harris). Directed by Charlene V. Smith and Kelly Elliott, their two scenes are bright and colorful, big and broad and beautiful.

Sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of Tremont, I was reminded of that Good Friday in 1993, when Guerrilla Theater Company were engaged to perform a series of medieval monologues on the steps of Zion United Church (right up West 14th Street from the park) as part of a “prayer walk” inspired by the seven last words of Christ, in which the faithful would walk to each of the many churches in the neighborhood. That day, I was Pilate, in a fresh charcoal gray, double-breasted suit and floral tie, and I condemned a man to death.

Civilization has come such a long way in the past two thousand years.

Unruly Grandeur presents the York Plays, today at 2:00 PM at the gazebo in Lincoln Park, Tremont. Admission is free. Donate to send Unruly Grandeur to Toronto!