Artistic Statement

Artistic Statement

Marcus Scott is a black nerd, or "blerd." Over the course of my artistic journey, I’ve come to discover that my plays investigate previously unexamined subcultures within communities of color—particularly within the black community—and how sociopolitical dogma facilitates or derails everyday life. My characters are often black youth or young adults coming of age and grappling with governmental, institutional or corporate tenets because of their perceived otherness. Within my plays, I deconstruct, dissect, analyze, unearth and meditate on black people in predominantly white (usually Usonian) spaces in their quest for excellence, acceptance, assimilation, equality and justice. Lately in my artistic journey, I am exploring how such a broken system enables other minority groups to embrace and even uphold white supremacy, disenfranchisement and anti-blackness in America. My characters range from punk rockers and brainiac geeks to Divine Nine fraternity members and conservative republicans, all of whom are challenged and confronted by the rubrics of a society that does not favor them. In my writing, my characters grapple with coming of age, intersectionality, hybridity, social stratification, Afro-pessimism and American disillusionment, while my work is informed by an anti-colonial, anti-racist, queer Black internationalist perspective. When I am not doing all that, I write about nerd culture and black nerd problems. With this work, I hope to decolonize theatre spaces and provide a point of entry for those for whom the theatre has historically been inaccessible.