‘WHETHER I should go to Edinburgh was a huge topic of conversation. But it was a personal choice to not let fear stop me from doing what needs to be done.”
US-based Priyanka Shetty is preparing for her run at the Fringe, by contacting immigration lawyers and putting an emergency plan in place in case she is deported to India – her country of birth - upon her return to America.
Advertised as the “play Donald Trump doesn’t want you to see,” Shetty is aware of the potential backlash her show could bring.
“Friends have said ‘you cannot leave the country right now, wait until things cool off’– but when do things ever cool off?
"I feel my values system lies in terms of being an artist and the subject matter that I want to write about. It was a huge crisis of morals and faith, but for me, if I don't see this through, I don't think I can face myself in the mirror.”
Shetty arrived in the US as an international student. She had lived in India all her life, and in 2016 she first set foot in America to switch fields from engineering to pursuing arts full time.
She ultimately accepted an offer from the University of Virginia, and while experiencing the culture shock of being in a new country, she noticed explicitly racist ways in which she was being treated, and that her wider environment was shifting, quickly.
Shetty was living in what would become one of the most talked-about towns in the world –Charlottesville.
Summer, August 2017
An array of alt-right groups, including KKK Klansmen, began marching on August 11 in response to the removal of Confederate monuments and statues after a fatal shooting of black church members by a white supremacist in 2015.
The Unite the Right rally turned violent, leaving more than 30 injured. The next morning, a state of emergency was declared, just before a white supremacist deliberately drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters.
One woman, Heather Heyer, was killed, while 35 others were injured.
The driver fled the scene in his car but was later arrested, tried and convicted.
"Right after that, it felt like that it was a very charged environment where suddenly, it was OK to be openly and blatantly racist.”
As an outsider and an immigrant who was interested in the history of the United States, Shetty was astonished at how something so violent could happen in Charlottesville – home to several founding fathers of America – and why a small university town ended up being the epicentre of all of it.
In the “very isolating environment,” Shetty sought community with the counter-protests.
“There are people you can reach out to when you're going through something, and for me at that moment I found the community in the people who were present as counter-protesters on August 11 and 12.
“In listening to their stories of how historically things have been for the minority communities in Charlottesville and how it wasn't a surprise to them that it happened in a city in a town like Charlottesville – was oddly comforting.
“I was dealing with something on a very micro-level, and they had seen the most horrible manifestation of that same thing, so there was a solidarity and comfort in that, but there was also a curiosity. It was like I was on this quest to understand the roots of it.”
Shetty went on to undertake more than 100 interviews with community members.
She started with people she knew, then through word-of-mouth, dozens showed up and eventually, those who took part in the initial far-right protests.
She spoke to the students whose videos of the torchlit rally went viral, and she spoke to the mother of Heyer (below) – the woman who lost her life.
It is Heyer’s last social media post that sums up the show, Shetty says: “If you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.
“It’s so relevant for where we are right now collectively in the world today. We're not outraged right now. We're not paying attention, and we're ignoring what we need to be focused on".
All the interviews, including transcripts of the civil trial, made it into the play Shetty has written, directed and stars in.
Shetty's final draft sees her play each character featured in the show, which was not the original vision, but she is grateful to have had the one one-on-one conversations with people to observe their mannerisms and characteristics.
The play premiered in DC in April, less than one mile away from the White House, where someone gave Shetty a red card with all the contact information of attorneys to call.
“Now we're in conversations with immigration lawyers and we have an action plan of what happens. Who do I call as soon as I land and who do I inform? And how long should they wait?”
Heyer’s mother, Susan Bro, also put Shetty in touch with lawyers, and others from Charlottesville are travelling to see the show on the event’s eighth anniversary.
“I hope this new version that I'm bringing to Edinburgh will also address the global scale of this. I feel like we are at the precipice of this sort of far-right leaning tendencies, not just in the US but globally and I do hope they’ll see that,” she says.
“We've heard Trump's stance on Charlottesville and how there were good people on both sides and all of that, right? And we see a direct correlation between, literally, the alt-right agenda items and every single executive order that has come out since then.
“It's extremely risky for me to take this on as an artist right now being an immigrant, especially when I'm stepping out of the country but, the subject matter of this play - even though it's about an event that happened in 2017 – is so rooted in the every single agenda item for Trump since he got into office.
"He would not want us to see the correlation between the alt-right, and what the government is doing right now.”
In a time where more people than ever are shutting off from global news, I ask Shetty, why should people come to this show when they could have a reprieve at a comedy or a light-hearted event?
“This show is, despite its subject matter, oddly entertaining, unbelievably. There's humour in it, and that's the brilliance of the director Yury. He understands pacing, so it's not going to be an assault on their emotions for an hour.
“It's going to be more of an invitation for an energised call to action.
“I want to appeal to everyone and say, sure, we must take care of ourselves by getting relief where we can, but these are also very critical times when we have to say ‘‘no, we’re not going to take that turn’.
"It's about taking stock of what we're going through together and figuring out what we're going to do next.”
