Priyanka Shetty’s one-woman docu-theatre play is subtitled ‘the show that Trump does not want you to see’ and on the one hand this is probably broadly accurate: the notional leader of the free world is so brittle I’m sure he’d ban anyone, anywhere, from seeing anything even mildly critical of him given half the chance. On the other hand, I suspect he’s not specifically aware that there’s a solo show about the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia playing at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe.
Originally from India, Shetty came to Charlottesville to study acting at the University of Virginia, which is in the city. Her degree forms a sort of fraught subplot to #Charlottesville. Shetty apparently didn’t have a good time, in her opinion experiencing racism from not only some students but also the staff, who failed to cast her in a production – despite this being mandatory – because of her accent. Essentially left to her own devices, she put together a solo show about Unite the Right, which didn’t please the faculty either.
But here the show is - albeit refined over a number of years - and now directed by Yury Urnov. And it’s a solid introduction to both the events of the rally – which many of us will remember – and the precise context to them – which are probably hazier to the average Brit.
Unite the Right was nominally a response to the city of Charlottesville’s decision to remove Confederate statues from its streets. Various factions from the right – different flavours of Nazi, basically – took to the street. In the most infamous moment, a march attendee drove into a group of counter protesters, killing a young woman named Heather Danielle Heyer.
Quoting verbatim from the diverse, interesting cross section of Charlottesville locals she interviewed, Shetty builds up an intriguing picture of the city as a superficially liberal town with unaddressed tensions. Her narrative hops about between background to the rally to the rally itself and onto its aftermath and the civil trials for its ringleaders. Shetty does a neat job of being an earnest presenter who nonetheless makes the agitators seem amusingly preposterous at times – most notably when she reads out the cringe beat poetry of rally co-organiser Jason Kessler.
Would Trump mind any of this? I think (wisely) Shetty doesn’t really talk about him that much: of course his election emboldened the far right, but the President wasn’t personally involved in the rally. However, Shetty does channel him at the end, quoting his bizarre, shameful response to Heyer’s death verbatim. We all remember the ‘very fine people on both sides’ stuff, but the unnerving thing is how mad Trump sounds, rambling on about a vineyard he owns when he’s meant to be reassuring the nation.
Of course Charlottesville is old news now. But the daily churn of awfulness during the second Trump presidency shouldn’t mean we shrug off the events of the first – in many ways it’s America’s ability to ‘move beyond’ January 6 2021 that has landed it (and by extension us) in its current extra dystopian era. Shetty’s show isn’t perfect, and I think her attempts to write herself into the narrative ultimately don’t quite work. But the deep dive into the rally is deft, informative and compelling.
