A cast of 54 — including a 19-member angel chorus — will perform 50 short plays over a projected five and a half to six hours, dinner and dessert breaks included. With the largest ensemble the Flea has ever featured, plenty of dance and the occasional fight scene, the show literally shakes the building.

Billy Porter, the Tony-winning star of “Kinky Boots,” and Kirsten Greenidge (“Milk Like Sugar”) separately expressed interest in writing pieces with a gospel flavor. So they were made a team: words by Ms. Greenidge, music by Mr. Porter and his cousin Loren Kirkland.

When Stephen Adly Guirgis, slated to write “The Crucifixion,” dropped out because his schedule became too tight, Craig Lucas (“Prelude to a Kiss,” “Ode to Joy”) took that commission in addition to the one he already had.

José Rivera wrote a second play, too, but this one wasn’t adapted from the York Cycle. At a rehearsal, Mr. Rivera, the playwright (“Adoration of the Old Woman”) and screenwriter (“The Motorcycle Diaries”), was struck by the absence of any sermon for Jesus to give. So he started composing one then and there — “like a poem,” he said — on the back of an old program he had in his bag. “I wanted to write something where he got to express just how much beauty there is in the world, despite all the darkness,” Mr. Rivera said. That play, “Sermon of the Senses,” now ends the evening.

As a child in England, Mr. Iskandar was taken to see the mystery plays in York. In medieval times, when a town would stage a cycle of Bible stories, responsibility for the plays was divided among its various craft guilds. In York, the shipwrights’ guild was in charge of “The Building of the Ark,” for example, while the butchers oversaw “The Death of Christ.” Actors performed the mystery plays on pageant wagons, which were pulled through the city.