‘If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” says one of the voices in this urgent verbatim show about the rise of the “alt-right”. Eight years ago this month, a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, resulted in three deaths and at least 19 serious injuries.
If it did not attract the same level of global attention as the mob attack on the US Capitol three-and-a-half years later, it raised a similar red flag about the rise of extremist ideology in the US and beyond.
Priyanka Shetty was an acting student at the University of Virginia at the time of the clash between protesters and counter-protesters and set about recording the community’s responses. She spoke to fellow citizens, trawled far right websites, found contemporary news reports and, more recently, got hold of court transcripts from the prosecution of the white-supremacist conspirators.
In a polished and confident performance, directed by Yury Urnov for Richard Jordan and Yellow Raincoat productions, she snaps quickly from voice to voice to create a social collage: those who saw trouble coming, those blind-sided by it and those defiant in their racist tribalism. Lawyers talk about first amendment rights, officials talk about the joy of life in a friendly college town and witnesses comment on the indifference of police officers as violence erupted.
The tapestry of perspectives makes Charlottesville not just an obvious condemnation of loathsome beliefs, but a richer vision of how such disruption tears at the social fabric.
Going a step further, the Indian-born Shetty weaves in her own experience of discrimination: a joke in class about her appearance; failing to get a part in either of the college productions; her complaints brushed aside by a dismissive teacher. Isolated incidents or part of a racist continuum that stretches from small acts of exclusion to the murderous ideology of fascism?
