THE PIECE
South Bronx, July 14, 1970. At dawn, members of the Young Lords occupy Lincoln Hospital, a city-run institution so notorious for medical neglect that the community has given it another name: The Butcher Shop. After years of systemic failure, a coalition of radical activists, sympathetic medical workers, and community members decides waiting for change is no longer an option. As the occupiers barricade themselves inside, the threat of an NYPD raid looms. With patients’ lives hanging in the balance and city officials closing in, competing visions of care, power, and liberation collide. Outside, the clock is ticking. Inside, the fight for the community’s future may prove as complicated as the system they seek to dismantle. Inspired by the Young Lords’ historic occupation of Lincoln Hospital, The Hypocrites is a taut, music-driven drama about institutional hypocrisy, radical solidarity, and the audacity of turning a system built to fail a community into an instrument of its survival.
THE ARTIST
MARCUS SCOTT is a dramatist & journalist. Heartbeat Opera commissioned Scott to adapt Beethoven’s FIDELIO (Co-writer; Met Live Arts at the MET Museum, NY Times Critic’s Pick). Selected plays: TUMBLEWEED (2025 Orlando Shakes PlayFest; finalist: BAPF; semifinalist: O’Neill NPC, Blue Ink Award, Princess Grace Award), SIBLING RIVALRIES (2022 Zoetic Stage's Finstrom Festival of New Work at the Adrienne Arsht Center; finalist: Seven Devils, Normal Ave NAPseries, Royer Award; semi-finalist: O’Neill NPC, Princess Grace Award, Blue Ink, Lanford Wilson New American Play Festival), THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD (finalist: Princess Grace Award, Blue Ink Award; semifinalist: BAPF, Irons in the Fire & O’Neill NPC), VINYL VANGUARD (2024 Step1 R&D Series) and CHERRY BOMB (recipient: Drama League First Stage Artist-In-Residence). Scott is the recipient of the Robert Chelsey/Victor Bumbalo Foundation Award and a 2025 Ryan Hudak LGBTQ+ Dramatic Writing Award finalist. Other honors include finalist status for the Dramatists Guild Foundation National Fellowship, Many Voices Fellowship, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab, and NYSAF Founders’ Award. He is a Doric Wilson Independent Playwright Award semifinalist. His extensive residencies include The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, The Guggenheim (Works & Process), SPACE on Ryder Farm (via Liberation Theatre Co), Art House Productions INKubator, Maria Irene Fornés Workshop, JACK, Goodspeed Opera House, La Maison de Simon (France), The Fire This Time Festival New Works Lab and The Outrage Queer Writers Residency. His cultural criticism appears in Architectural Digest, Time Out New York, American Theatre Magazine, Playbill, Elle, Out, and The Brooklyn Rail. He holds a BFA from State University College at Buffalo and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.