Jen Tullock and the World She Left Behind
Jen Tullock’s solo play, Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God, opens October 13. Photo: Jordan Best.
Jen Tullock knows she can’t be as callous as her main character.
The Severance star has co-written, with playwright Frank Winters, Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God, inspired by her experiences growing up in—and walking away from—a strict Evangelical community in Kentucky. In the show, currently running at Playwrights Horizons under the direction of Jared Mezzocchi, Tullock also plays every role, with character transitions and scene shifts occurring through the literal lens of onstage camerawork and live editing.
Like her protagonist, Frances, Tullock spent her childhood immersed in fundamentalist Christian doctrine; she did missionary work in Poland; she realized she was gay “very young”; she left the church in her teens and started over. “I crafted an entirely new identity, an entirely new moral litmus, because my entire worldview was crafted on the teachings of Jesus,” says Tullock. “When that element was removed at age 17, I didn’t know how to be in the secular world.”
Where Tullock is processing her grief through playwriting, Frances does so in the form of a memoir, returning to Kentucky to seek permission from the people in her life to write about them. Unlike Frances, Tullock is intentional about how she writes and speaks about her history. “Frances is really reckless with the way she drags people through the mud without their consent,” she says. “I’m having to be really careful and respectful about how I talk about the autobiographical elements.”
To protect the innocent, or perhaps the guilty, Tullock and Winters developed characters based on composites of those Tullock knew in her life. “There’s no real one-to-one,” she explains. “We wanted to have enough of a fictional distance, both from a creative standpoint and also from a personal one.”
Establishing that deliberate narrative is another trait Tullock and Frances share, though, again, Frances’s method is much less kind and much more self-serving. Frances “becomes a manipulator because she herself was manipulated,” says Tullock. “She is so hell-bent on curating and then maintaining her version of every story.” To literalize that tendency, Tullock turned to the increasingly trendy device of live camerawork onstage.
The production uses multiple cameras and live looping systems as Tullock transitions among various characters. Photo: Jordan Best.
And before you say anything, she’s ready for the comparisons to Jamie Lloyd’s Sunset Boulevard and Kip Williams’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, starring Sarah Snook portraying every character, two recent Broadway hits that also utilized live camerawork. “We’re still in such a nascent era of seeing media in this form on stage that it’s totally fair and understandable when people draw those comparisons,” Tullock says. “If you’ve only ever seen a rabbit pulled out of a hat once before, when you see it again you’ll think it’s the same trick.”
But she’s quick to justify the method dramaturgically and assert the approach’s uniqueness. “We’re working to develop a new language for cameras and how they can be used [onstage],” says Tullock. “I feel proud of that. I also feel protective of it, because I think—I hope—we are trying something new here. I’m not yet here to say that I know we’re getting it right, but I know we’re trying from an honest place.”
“The hope is that you as an audience member won’t feel like this is a solo show, but rather a show about many people, bursting from the imagination of one control-obsessed, traumatized homo.”
From the beginning, Tullock and her team devised the work so the camera was essential to the storytelling. They established that Tullock wasn’t actually the one playing all the characters. She was playing Frances, and Frances was playing everyone else. “Every camera move is motivated by what Frances is trying to tell you about the character she’s filming in that moment. Ultimately, it was the only form that served the heart of the story, which was about someone so obsessed with control that they couldn’t let anyone else do it,” she says. “The hope is that you as an audience member won’t feel like this is a solo show, but rather a show about many people, bursting from the imagination of one control-obsessed, traumatized homo.”
Trauma and its reverberations sit at the heart of Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God. For Tullock, the act of returning to a home filled with pain and complexity is worth exploring, even when doing so forces an uncomfortable self-examination. “Like so many people that leave restrictive religious communities, I shot out at such a tremendous speed that I never really looked at what I left,” says Tullock. “I’m in my forties now and looking back at my life the way I think you do at this age and starting to go, ‘Where was I toxic? Where was I the problem?’” In other words, how can she make different choices than Frances?
In writing this play, Tullock has also contended with another aspect of leaving a world behind, even one that hurt you: “There are things that I miss, and there’s a shame that comes with those moments of missing certain elements,” she says. “There are elements of community and spirituality that I didn’t have a language for outside of [Evangelicalism].”
And when that void is exposed, sometimes old habits come crashing back, especially in times of great stress. There’s a moment in the play, based on an event in Tullock’s life, in which Frances, in a panic, slips into prayer. “I was shocked to find myself praying,” recalls Tullock. “It happened by rote. It was like I heard it coming out of someone else’s mouth, and then I realized it was me.” In fictionalizing it, Tullock found a moment of therapy.
Still, reliving the actual event repeatedly as an actor has taken its toll. “I still can’t get through [it onstage], to be honest with you,” says Tullock. We spoke two days before the play’s first preview, when she had just finished rehearsal. “Singing a hymn is a sacred ritual that I have not returned to in so many years,” she says. “And even doing it in a fictional setting, we get to that moment and my body is still struggling.” But it’s that struggle she hopes audiences will recognize and connect with: “We are hoping [this play] feels like a love letter to anyone who feels homesick for a place to which they can’t return.”