She had moved from India to live the American dream. Priyanka Shetty came to study acting at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, a liberal place of clipped lawns and classical architecture rated in one survey as the happiest city in America.
But what she found was isolation and discomfort because of her race and, as the era of Donald Trump dawned, a nation on the cusp of hostility towards immigrants like her. Then came a white supremacist march through Charlottesville and an explosion of racist violence that left one woman dead.
Shetty combines the personal and political in a one-woman show, #Charlottesville, currently receiving its premiere at the Keegan Theatre in Washington. Based on verbatim interviews with more than a hundred local residents, court transcripts and political speeches, it argues that Charlottesville was a warning from history that went unheeded.
“I don’t know why there’s this denial about the state of affairs right now in the country,” the 35-year-old said by phone this week. “I don’t know how many more wake-up calls we need. I’m not saying this play will be that wake-up call but at least I hope to remind people of something that may seem like old news, which is not really old news. It’s very much relevant today.”
When Shetty, from Bangalore in southern India, auditioned for a master of fine arts degree in acting at the University of Virginia in 2015, Barack Obama was still president. “For me America was the place of full of opportunities because to pursue a field like this in India the odds of success are so low,” she said.
“To be in the place where there’s Broadway and Hollywood and all of these things to aspire to was a big deal. It was and is still full of promise but at that point I don’t think I sensed the danger of being an immigrant or person of colour as much as I do today.”
Charlottesville is a liberal city in a conservative region but Shetty did not always feel welcome. “It’s something as simple as, when I’m walking down the streets of Charlottesville, it felt like I wasn’t supposed to be there. I had been to other cities in the US and never felt that way.
“But walking down the streets of Charlottesville always felt like the eyes on me, even among mostly undergraduates, with this look of, ‘What are you doing here?’ It was liberal in in many ways but I always was hyper aware that I was an outsider or there was this weird feeling under my skin that I shouldn’t be there.”
Shetty was out of town when hundreds of white nationalists descended on Charlottesville for a “Unite the Right” rally on 11 and 12 August 2017, ostensibly protesting the planned removal of a statue of the Confederate general Robert E Lee. They carried torches and marched through the University of Virginia campus chanting “Jews will not replace us!”
Clashes with anti-racism demonstrators broke out both days, prompting authorities to declare the gathering on 12 August an “unlawful assembly” and order crowds to disperse. A man then rammed his car into a peaceful group of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and injuring 35.
Shetty recalls: “My immediate impulse was that it was reminiscent of Nazi Germany, especially the kind of slogans that were being chanted and the drama of the open flames. It was scary and my response was to go and read about this movement and who these people were and that led me to the Daily Stormer [a neo-nazi website] and ‘A Normie’s Guide to the Alt-Right’ [an article on the site setting out the far right’s extremist agenda].
“There was a curiosity about it and my mind went to the place that this is a possibility in the United States of America, like it was in Germany back then. It didn’t seem that far fetched to me then and it doesn’t seem that far fetched to me now.”
Shetty believes the atrocity represented an urgent lesson about a growing faction of far right extremists who believe the white race is superior, women should be sent back home to produce and raise children, immigrants should be deported, Black people should be allocated a different territory or sent back to Africa and homosexuality should be banned.
“America was the place where you could be an immigrant, you could be a woman, you could be a member of the LGBTQ+ community and you could be equal and well respected and successful. But there are a significant number of people who hold an idea of superiority and think certain other people who don’t fall into that need to be eliminated.”
The horror of Charlottesville inspired Joe Biden to come out of political retirement and run for president in 2020. On her return to the city, Shetty expected the community to be on high alert and the university in particular to be grappling with the implications.
“What I instead saw was people were ashamed for Charlottesville to be associated with something like this and, for some reason, also didn’t want to acknowledge the antisemitic nature of it. As an immigrant, it confused me.
“Charlottesville was that warning which many people think they didn’t ignore but we absolutely did because what were the real action items that came out of it? Zero. Then January 6 was another warning that we ignored and here we are in 2025 and we are terrified, with not just the US many other places in the world leaning in these scary directions.”
Shetty felt that American theatre was also failing to respond but, as an outsider, doubted whether she was the right person to confront it. Then she hit upon the idea of interviewing community members to make a verbatim piece in the style of Anna Deavere Smith, renowned for combining journalistic techniques with individual characterisations performance.
Shetty did not have permission from the drama department to do the interviews, so she met the subjects at weekends and quickly ushered them in a lift and then into a basement classroom. She did the interviews on a camera set up for actors to self-tape auditions then transcribed them hand which, though painstaking, helped her capture the cadences and mannerisms of the subjects on stage.
Among all the interviewees, two distinct groups emerged. Shetty said: “There were a bunch of people who were completely flabbergasted that something like this had happened in their town and did not see it coming. There were other people who were like, well, this is how it’s been all along.”
With Trump now back in the White House and waging a crackdown against immigrants, civil rights in America are under attack. That includes a series of arrests of international students who are not accused of any crime but have been involved in pro-Palestinian activism on student campuses. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and a doctoral student at Tufts University, was sent to detention this week after being snatched off the street outside her home.
Shetty, who now lives in Philadelphia, reflected: “I echo a lot of what the interviewees in #Charlottesville said, that America wasn’t great to begin with. But it is sad to see it regress further and further when significant efforts were being made to go in the other direction. Now it feels like we’ve taken 20, 30, 50 steps back and it’s going to take a long time to recover from all of this, if at all.”
Directed by Russian-born Yury Urnov, Shetty plays multiple roles in #Charlottesville including Trump – complete with oversized red tie – and Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. Performing at small venue just a mile from the White House, Shetty is aware that she too could become a target but regards art as an essential act of resistance.
“Of course we worry because right now given how people who are green card holders and permanent residents are being targeted it’s very easy to pinpoint someone. As an immigrant, I know what it takes to even get here, especially in the arts. I had to prove that I’m an artist of ‘extraordinary ability’, which is insanely difficult to do.
“To know that it could be taken away at any moment is scary but at the same time now is not the time to stand down. Sometimes it feels foolish because I feel like, ‘They don’t care about their their country, why should I?’ But there’s something in me that just can’t sit idle and do nothing.”
She added: “It may be super foolish to take this on at this time, given how much is at stake for me personally too but I can’t help it. I would still like to believe that America is a place where we can question things and criticise something and still be OK. I would still like to believe that.”
