Azuka and Simpatico present Priyanka Shetty’s #Charlottesville

In the show notes, Shetty writes “Charlottesville is too recent to comfortably belong to history, but somehow old enough to disappear from our attention.” In 2017, Shetty had just arrived in the United States from India to pursue her MFA in acting at the University of Virginia. These events were defining for her.

A theater of witness

Experiencing micro-aggressions in the MFA program that included not being cast in mainstage productions, Shetty decided to chart her own course and take on an independent project. She recorded interviews with hundreds of Charlottesville citizens and ultimately created a multi-media, documentary-style theater piece that integrates their testimony with court transcripts and audio and video footage of the march and its ensuing violence.

#Charlottesville premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2025, winning the Scotsman Fringe First Award for Outstanding New Writing. Now it makes its Philadelphia debut, co-produced by Azuka Theatre, Simpatico Theatre, and Richard Jordan Productions in association with The Pleasance. Directed here by Yury Urnov, the show runs a tight 75 minutes, bringing the disturbing events of the Unite the Right rally back through a kind of theater of witness.

Mixed characterization

Shetty clearly styles the writing and performance in the model of Anna Deavere Smith, whose groundbreaking, award-winning 1992 Fires in the Mirror: Crown Heights, Brooklyn and Other Identities humanized the complex, polarizing racial riots between the Black and Hasidic communities in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

While Deavere Smith spent great lengths inhabiting each character in body and voice, Shetty creates a less distinctive chorus of Charlottesville witnesses. She embodies some more than others (Tami, a restaurant server, is most memorable); we don’t learn much about the dean of students, for example, besides that he is a UVA alum who returned to Charlottesville for the job. A naive female first-year student is from Louisiana, but her accent doesn’t clearly place her as from there.

Shetty uses her struggle in her MFA program as a kind of meta layer, weaving in and out around the events that took place during the rally, which at times feels distracting. Unfortunately, the racism Shetty experienced in this academic setting could have taken place at any university, in any city. This aspect of the narrative moves us away from the urgency of the Charlottesville rally and its aftermath.

Powerful moments

But throughout the show, what brings us back to that tension is the overlay of real video fragments and also news-style clips created by Shetty in which she plays a news anchor, describing the events as they’re unfolding in real time. We’re reminded that as the rally became increasingly violent, police did not intercede to help people who were hurt.

One of the most affecting moments of #Charlottesville comes when Shetty portrays the mother of Heather Heyer, the peaceful demonstrator fatally struck by a neo-Nazi’s car. The rawness of Heyer’s grief and the pain of losing her daughter in such traumatic circumstances is gut-wrenching, and Shetty’s performance is both vulnerable and powerful here.

Similarly powerful technical aspects, created by scenic designer Matthew J. Keenan and video designer Dylan Uremovich, underscore Shetty’s writing. Following the scene where Shetty portrays Heyer’s mother, we hear an audio transcript (and read the captions) of a disturbing conversation between the neo-Nazi perpetrator and his mother. The split between performance and footage feels very seamless and always intentional.

Uncomfortable reactions

At the start of the opening-night performance, Simpatico artistic director Allison Heishman’s curtain speech alerted us to the show’s racist, antisemitic, and violent content, encouraging us to step outside if we needed a break. People respond to watching tense and uncomfortable footage in different ways. One video clip showed unsettling memes of Pepe the Frog, the alt-right cartoon character, as Hitler and other fascist figures, and the people behind me roared with laughter.

Other disturbing visuals that flashed on the screen were Nazi-style propaganda drawings of Jewish people; again, very loud laughter came from the people behind me. My plus one and I are Jewish, and we commented afterward about how disorienting that reaction felt to us. They were laughing at the outrageousness of the antisemitism, right?

Still hitting close to home

I do remember where I was during those awful days in 2017. It was a typical humid August weekend in Philadelphia and I remember the trembling in my mother’s voice when I called her. “Pop-pop always said it would happen here,” she said, a refrain that was repeated throughout my childhood; my grandfather left Germany in 1933 at age 19 when the Nazis came to power and he lost all of his family. Hitler never felt far away in my home.

A play like #Charlottesville is important, especially now, weeks before the midterm elections when so much is at stake for our democracy, and our hopes for the kind of equitable country that this could be. So much of US history is forgotten. While Shetty’s performances may be mixed, her vision is clear and strong, and I applaud this collaboration of theaters for taking this work on.

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