The Nativity - A Nativity

It's happening - we're doing a Nativity in December.  We're calling it The Nativity.  Subtle, I know.  It's going to feature six complete 'pageants' from the N-Town play, plus a little bit from another.

Our Nativity Line Up -
Annunciation: a short passage
Joseph's Doubts
The Nativity
The Shepherds
The Kings
The Purification
Slaughter of the Innocents

Now there are a lot of other Nativity applicable pageants contained in the N-Town play and they're all  very interesting, but the N-Town play is very odd and there are lots of different ways of cutting the cloth.  It's all part of a longer term plan, so here's my thinking.
The N-Town play is a compilation - a composite of a number of different sources, edited together into the final manuscript.  So, you've got the original pageants, performed individually or in some order from a greater whole, but they've been cut up and rearranged and turned into another play - the N-Town play.  It's a bit like we've lost Shakespeare's history plays, but we've got a copy of the Barton/Hall script for The Wars of the Roses - though we don't know whether the text was created to be performed, or as a private document for an individual/family/institution, though most people tend towards for the latter.
The question is then, how do you perform it?  Attempt each play individually, putting the additions or cuts to one side and try to get at the original (whatever that means) text, or perform the final form of the play - which it may never have been meant to be?
The long term plan is this - perform sections of the play in some detail in a number of locations around East Anglia (from whence the plays came), recording, archiving and noting the way the text works (or doesn't) in an individual way.  We may go back to some plays and perform them with others.  The Nativity sequence I've chosen above could be done quite differently, we're sticking to the main thrust of the story in this selection, but we could mix in a number of other plays, perform the Kings and Slaughter as one text, without the addition of Simeon and the Purification in the middle etc.  So this isn't The Nativity, as such, in December we'll be performing A The Nativity.  We'll possibly perform another very different The Nativity in the future.
Once we've played around with all the texts in an individualistic way, curating the material in different ways, we'll look at a complete staging of the whole play.
To some degree this is a text I am coming back to.  I used the Passion Play 1 from N-Town as the primary text for a version of The Passion three years ago.  I'm rather looking forward to covering that text again in a more consistent way sometime soon.