The #Charlottesville journey continues!

Voices Festival Productions discovered Priyanka Shetty in 2019 at a living room reading of an 8-person version of her stirring verbatim theater chronicle of the events of August 11th and 12th, 2017, when white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville, Virginia for the “Unite the Right” rally on the pretext of expressing outrage against the removal of the confederate monument of Robert E. Lee, leading to a violent clash with counter-protesters. Early during the pandemic, the play transformed into an unflinching tour-de-force performance, and VFP was there to help Priyanka expand the timeframe of the play to include the trial of the co-conspirators who organized the march-turned-violent altercation with counter-protesters.

We hosted a residency for Priyanka in April of 2023, and then produced a workshop production of the show for Capital Fringe Festival that ran for 3 performances in July, 2023. From there, work continued and inquiries deepened, in a summer 2024 workshop at the Tony-Award winning Wilma Theatre, where the workshop was helmed by Wilma co-artistic director, Yury Urnov.

Now VFP joins a partnership with Keegan Theatre, just down the road in DuPont Circle, NW DC, to bring this eye-popping, visually expanded show to life in its long-awaiting, official World Premiere, extended run production.

#CHARLOTTESVILLE unpacks the complex issues surrounding race and identity in modern-day America from her own perspective as an immigrant from India, while drawing parallels to the rise of nationalism and racial division in other parts of the world. Constructed verbatim from interviews with over a hundred local residents, court transcripts from the civil trial, and news reports in the style of Anna Deavere Smith and the Tectonic Theater Project, #CHARLOTTESVILLE is an urgent and personal exploration of how a town and the nation grapple with white supremacy.