The 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville became a watershed moment in recent American history. … Playwright and performer Priyanka Shetty was a graduate student in the theater department at the University of Virginia that year, her response to rally was #CHARLOTTESVILLE, her thesis project. … The current version of the documentary-style play, now receiving its world premiere at Keegan Theatre in partnership with Voices Festival Productions, has Shetty playing all the characters and follows three main plot threads: the chronology of the Unite the Right rally as laid out in the 2021 case Sines v. Kessler, interspersed with excerpts of her interviews with Charlottesville residents and her own experiences as a student.
Shetty’s command of gesture is masterful, making each of her subjects physically distinct, and while she doesn’t fully inhabit every regional accent, her characters all have distinct speech patterns since she based her script off of court transcripts and recorded interviews.
Under the direction of Yury Urnov, a talented team has developed #CHARLOTTESVILLE from a thesis project into a professional production. Dylan Uremovitch’s use of projections provides a multimedia flair, ranging from information on the Unite the Right defendants, to video collages (often illustrating Anglin’s troll culture tactics), to mock newscasts with Shetty playing no less than three TV journalists at once. The set, designed by Matthew J. Keenan, is painted like marble and includes broken and toppled pillars representing the broken promises of pluralistic democracy and of the university founded by Thomas Jefferson.
Some may have initially thought that 2021 inauguration of Biden would make plays like #CHARLOTTESVILLE less necessary. But a second Trump administration — whose campaign against DEI has already led to the erasure of references to Black people, women, the LGBTQIA community, and even references to the Holocaust from government websites and historical markers — Shetty’s play is urgent. #CHARLOTTESVILLE is artfully conceived and performed, and aptly meets the moment.
