BRAVO

‘Severance’ Star Jen Tullock Delivers Sensational One-Woman Show

“Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God” is a powerful interrogation of faith, identity, and love.

The use of video and screens on stage has become a major bugbear for theater audiences. Often introduced for some jazziness in a show, they too often prove to be vexing diversion rather than valuable addition. When you see them on a stage, a theatergoer’s heart can sink: We are around them all day, can’t we just sit in a theater and not be faced with them!

But perhaps we shouldn’t leap to scorn too quickly. In a production like Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God (Playwrights Horizons, to Nov. 9), written by Severance star Jen Tullock and Frank Winters, Stefania Bulbarella’s video and screens are used in a completely original, brilliant, and, yes vital, way.

Inspired by Tullock’s own upbringing in Kentucky within the evangelical church, though not strictly autobiographical, this beautifully written and performed solo play—directed by Jared Mezzocchi—stars Tullock as Frances, an author who returns to the town of her childhood. There she unearths a past of abuse, sadness, and onetime love—a very sweet first love that beams into the present day—in service of finishing her new book, Never the Twain Shall Meet: Losing God and Finding Myself.

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On a minimally furnished stage, with evocative lighting by Amith Chandrashaker, Tullock plays not just Frances but multiple characters, including a creepy pastor, hectoring mother, and the woman who could have been and may still be her girlfriend. There is also, in a much-needed comedic character, Frances’ agent, who is in Los Angeles and always in a ridiculous flap about something, summarizing the gravity of the Frances’ trip home in the shallowest of terms, and focused on the bottom line of avoiding legal problems and instead just having another bright, shiny bestseller on her hands.

It is intriguing that on screen Tullock plays Devon, the sister of Adam Scott’s character in the Apple TV+ series, who is trying to find out the truth of what may be happening in the shadowy world of work. In this play Frances is involved in another attempted act of detection and truth-finding—this one with the added element of faith, and that faith as experienced in all its shades by a queer person.

Tullock inhabits the many characters on stage with immense poise and skill. The power of her performance is aided by the array of cameras observing her multi-inhabitation, and then these inhabitations being screened singly and in multiples behind her, sometimes in movement and sometimes frozen still. These video effects and screens are integral to the drama, and show us tantalizing glimpses of all the characters and the emotional stakes they are negotiating.

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What we ultimately witness are a conflict and confluence of stories: the ones we tell, the ones we market and sell, and the real ones that are far knottier and harder to unpick and make sense of. The show’s ending, which shall go un-spoilt here, is gorgeous and unexpected—much like the experience of alighting upon a theater show that is a sterling advertisement for the power of video screens.

Tim TeemanSenior Editor and Writer

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