Theatre in the Kingdom of Ewistar
How do you expect to see a play? Probably indoors, in a building designed specifically for plays, or at least in an auditorium, a room designed for performances and presentations. Maybe you expect to see it in a park or tent, if it's an amateur production or a part of a festival. Probably you don't expect to go to the nearest motel, though, and probably you don't expect to see one performed in the back of a pickup truck on the side of a city street. These last two, however, are as analogous to theatre in the late Middle Ages as the first ones are, a fact a GM can use to their advantage in tabletop games.
As I mentioned in previous posts in this series, the setting for my main campaign is based as much on early modern (ie. Renaissance) London as it is on the high or late medieval periods, though I make allowances for the mechanics and tropes of 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. In particular I am weaving the early modern and medieval periods together for the Kingdom of Ewistar's literary scenes, and so I imagine that Ewistar and its neighbours have a variety of theatrical traditions and venues, which I'll outline below. I have not explored them all in the campaign itself, but I nonetheless have some ideas for using each type to communicate information to your players.
A sketch of the Swan Theatre, circa 1596 (source)
Venues and Audiences
Stableyards. In the late medieval period, travelling players (aka acting troupes) would often perform their plays in an inn's stableyard. The modern equivalent would be a performance in a motel parking lot. There would be no ticketed admission here; according to my undergraduate medieval literature professor, they would pass around a hat during the last half of the play, expecting the audience to put in some money. Plays from the period might even contain lines cajoling the audience into paying more, threatening not to finish the story if the spectators don't make it worth their while. (The morality play Mankind does something clever with this, implicating the audience in a particular plot point.)
Plenty of adventuring parties frequent inns in ttrpgs. I imagine you could introduce an idea, whether that's a bit of lore or a theme you want to develop, through a play they happen to witness at a roadside inn. For example, if you think an upcoming plot point would make more sense to your players if they understood a taboo or other cultural preoccupation from your fictional world, maybe introduce them to the idea through a play at a roadside inn they visit.
Festivals. In particular towns in the late medieval period, the guilds would produce play cycles each year on specific feast days like Easter or Christmas. Each guild would be responsible for the same short play every year, supplying the cast and props. The plays would be performed several times each day on wagons drawn along a trail of designated stops throughout the town or city. The audience could stay at one stop and watch all of the plays in order, or they could follow their favourite from one stop to the next and see it several times. The best known of these plays, at least in English, were performed each year during the Feast of Corpus Christi in Wakefield in the 1500s, many of them attributed to the anonymous Wakefield Master.1 Each play covered some part of the Christian story, from Genesis to Judgement. Parade floats are a similar modern practice, though I think a closer analogy would be if people put on short plays in the back of pickups or on trailer wagons.
I think this might be a little harder to imagine in a regular D&D game or similar, but such a play cycle could be especially helpful in explaining the pantheons and myths of your setting. Plenty of adventurers become involved in celestial conflicts, so at many tables a crash course in religious history is useful groundwork, even foreshadowing.
School plays. In early modern England, on the other hand, students in some schools would learn Classical literature, which included a lot of Greek and Roman theatre. The students would sometimes perform these plays for their classmates and faculty, and the school's alumni might also attend. In time it became custom for faculty to write new plays for student performance. This kind of theatre was not open to the public but, because some students went on to become poets and playwrights, the school plays did influence the kinds of literature that were available to the public. The plays written here were often more influenced by Classical theatre than by medieval theatre. The modern equivalent is obvious but in some ways a little misleading: the main audience for contemporary school plays is the students' parents, which was only the case in the early modern period if their parents were among the alumni.
School plays would be the hardest kind of play to include in most ttrpg games, but not impossible. Learned PCs might be invited to a performance at their alma mater, for instance, and of course it would fit quite well in a Strixhaven game. These kinds of plays would be good for delivering information about the ancient past.
Playhouses. The best known plays from early modern England, your Hamlets and Doctor Faustuses and Romeo and Juliets, were all written for and performed in playhouses. Although this is most like the modern conception of the theatre, taking place in a building especially designed for the purpose, there are key differences. Playhouses were distinctly mixed-class entertainment and moralists of the day railed against them. The cheap seats were not seats at all but instead standing room in what was called the Pit, in front of the stage. The plays relied on natural light, not artificial lighting, and so the playhouses were open-air, performing in the afternoon. (This is one of the reasons moralists hated the theatre: servants and labourers would skip work to attend!) In these ways it was more like a baseball game, though of course what you were watching was art, not sport. These plays had a wide variety of influences, both Classical and medieval, and therefore developed into a variety of genres, which I talk a little about here.
That previous post also discusses how I imagine you could use these plays in your home game. The challenge for these plays is getting your PCs into a playhouse at all; in my experience, players are unlikely to say their characters go to the theatre in their downtime! However, if you really want to use this kind of theatre, you could always have a wealthy patron invite the PCs to see a play in their box seats, or you could have the local rogues guild propose a hand-off in the busy, distracted crowd in the Pit. While the PCs are there for plot reasons, you could use the play to deliver the information you want your players to have. I think something like a tragedy would work well for setting up certain themes: the on-stage villain could have motivations which rhyme with the party's current antagonist. A comedy, meanwhile, can reflect and exaggerate complicated relationships between key NPCs.
The Uses of Theatre
So far I've only considered the use of these plays in delivering discrete information relevant to the game's plot. While most of the time this information will be delivered through a knowledge check, now and then it is best for a GM to give the PCs information proactively so that the players stand a better chance of understanding or interpreting the events, characters, and artifacts that follow. Plays can replace direct exposition in these cases, at least some of the time. But there are other uses, too. I mentioned that you can use them to introduce themes, and I think that can be of some value. It can also be a way of creating atmosphere and verisimilitude, bringing your setting to life. Finally, your setting's literary scene can be part of a plot point.
In one of my anthology one-shots, agents of Queen Jovanna's half-brother and spymaster investigated plays that might be seditious; it turned out that at least one play and multiple satires were commissioned by a noblewoman who disapproved of the young new queen. (I based this on the very real history of plays and other literature being used for political ends, such as when conspirators commissioned a staging of Richard II just before the Earl of Essex's failed rebellion.) I will elaborate further once we have had a chance to play out the subplot in the main campaign, but for now I'll point out that nobles have historically used literature as part of their courtly intrigues, meaning you can do the same in your tabletop games.
The Wakefield Mystery Plays are a little different, actually, in that there is no evidence the different plays were divided among guilds, as the other mystery plays were. They would nonetheless be performed by community members, not by professional actors.↩