‘It’s very much relevant today’: the one-woman show on Charlottesville

Priyanka Shetty combines personal and political in #Charlottesville, a play that explores the deadly 2017 white supremacist rally

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.