This play written and performed by Priyanka Shetty is a political analysis of the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, then America’s Second Friendliest Place in the USA on and after August 11th 2017.  It is also a personal account and this actor takes on the voices of a myriad of people involved in the incident that was the Unite the Right Rally.

Priyanka comes from India to study a Masters in Acting and Drama at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.  This city was associated with Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father, the Third President of America and the primary author of the Declaration of Independence.  He wrote about equality but was also a slave owner. 

Immediately she tells us about the Far right of American politics.  There is Andrew Anglin of the Daily Stormer a Neo-Nazi.  He lost a court case when the first African American President of the American University in Washington DC sued him.  On the day that the student, Taylor Dumpson, was sworn in as American University’s student body president in May 2017, bananas were found hanging on nooses around campus.  This dreadful hatred behaviour didn’t reach UK news.

There is the Neo-Nazi Traditionalist Worker Party formed in 2013 and disbanded in 2018.  Its founder Matthew Heimbach listed its aims as, abolishing feminism, mass deportation of all people of color, and stated that women were the emasculators of men and Jews were to be removed from White Society.  This organisation was one of the organisers of the Unite the Right Rally. This rally was a response to the controversy over the removal of the Confederate Leader statues of Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson in Charlottesville.

Priyanka Shetty returns to people she has interviewed with their views on Charlottesville as a place to live and work and study on their reaction to the march.   She describes her own experience on 12th August when a van driven by James Alex Fields Jnr ploughed into a group of counter protestors and killed Heather Heyer and injured 35 people. 

The narrator takes us to the courtroom where the accused face the charge of incitement  to racially motivated violence and she voices the prosecuting and the defence lawyers.  We hear in detail the racist “humour” she faces from other students and about her not being cast in any acting role required by her degree because “she was too intellectual.”  That is how to disguise a rejection by making it sound like a compliment.

This is a fascinating and informative show with just one performer but the photographs and scenes projected behind keep the visual interest and Priyanka Shetty’s delivery is varied and gripping.  Theatrevibe, the site that doesn’t do stars awards five Fringe Festival stars (FFS) to Charlottesville.