Relevance is essential to Priyanka Shetty’s “#Charlottesville,” a methodical, sometimes stirring solo play recalling the deadly 2017 Unite the Right rally in the college town.
Now in a world premiere run at the Keegan Theatre in partnership with Voices Festival Productions, the play draws on interviews with more than a hundred Charlottesville-area residents, plus court transcripts and news reports. Directed by Yury Urnov, Shetty does a reasonable job calibrating diction and mannerisms as she channels people who witnessed, or were affected by, the 2017 events: A sweetly callow student. A seething local musician. And, most movingly, the desolate mother of Heather D. Heyer, who died when an avowed neo-Nazi rammed his car through a crowd.
Other moments chillingly summon alt-right voices, sometimes through Shetty’s mimicry and sometimes with video of white supremacists and their memes. (Dylan Uremovitch designed the projections and lighting.) Interwoven with Shetty’s own experiences as a University of Virginia graduate student, and unfurling on Matthew J. Keenan’s cracked-marble-like set, which evokes national ideals, “#Charlottesville” asks whether Unite the Right was an aberration or a strand in long-term American bigotry.
