Review: Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God

The story of the young queer individual raised in a conservative religious community, who faces adversity and later escapes to the big city to live their authentic truth, is an oft-repeated morality tale in the secular West—in which progressive cosmopolitanism triumphs over regressive traditionalism because love wins.

Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God, now making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons, is not that story—at least, that’s not the whole story. Jen Tullock’s solo show, written with Frank Winters and inspired by Tullock’s upbringing in an evangelical church, stealthily, brilliantly complicates a trope that has become gospel in the theater, television, and publishing industries.

The opening scene depicts a book talk for Frances Reinhardt’s soon-to-be-released memoir, Never the Twain Shall Meet: Losing God and Finding Myself, about the abuse that drove her away from Northeast Missions Church, a prominent evangelical organization that sends missionaries oversees (particularly Poland, that stronghold of the whore of Babylon) and occasionally helps converts resettle near its Kentucky headquarters. “And this was in Louisville,” the moderator asks, “am I saying that right?” (She’s not.)

The book is due out in a week, but Frances’s agent has learned that the church has obtained an advance copy and is threatening to sue. Unwilling to censor her truth, she travels back to Louisville where she finds herself locked in a delicate game of chess with Jeremy Young, the charismatic and infuriatingly affable leader of the church. Their unfortunate pawn is Agnieszka, a Polish woman Frances fell in love with on a mission trip. She knows that that love is requited, even if it was never explicitly acknowledged.

“I love to see you flourishing here, I love to see you using the car we got you,” says Kenny, a church henchman, to the immigrant single mother. “And I would just hate to see all of that go away.” And suddenly, we can see the porous border between Christian charity and mafia omertà.

Delivering a performance that is reminiscent of the work of Anna Deavere Smith, Tullock portrays every character with sharp specificity that never veers into caricature: the stoner brother, the emotionally taxing mother, the sycophantic agent. All of them leap off the stage and into the film adaptation playing in our minds.

It’s an especially impressive achievement in director Jared Mezzocchi’s production, which is a lot more complicated than it initially appears. Emmie Finckel’s set is primarily composed of a table and two folding chairs—the kind of setup you might see at a Barnes & Noble talkback. As the scene cuts to Kentucky, we can still hear voiceover questions from that event (sound designer Evdoxia Ragkou delivers ambient noise from those new locations while aurally holding us in the first scene). Three cameras on tripods surround Tullock, the live feeds of which are transformed in Stefania Bulbarella’s kaleidoscopic, force-multiplying, and occasionally disorienting projection design. It lends this solo play a cinematic quality under Amith Chandrashaker’s moody and occasionally too-dark lighting.

There’s a lot going on in this little solo play, and viewers might be tempted to tune out of what occasionally feels like a jumble of overlapping voices and scenes. But that exquisite mess is essential to the story Tullock and Winters are telling about the human brain as a palimpsest on which new truths are written even as traces of the old remain.

We see this most clearly when Frances gives an interview to CNN. “What your family did,” the television host proclaims, “I mean, it is unforgivable… You had no choice, as you say in the book, but to leave them.” She wants to hear Frances testify to how she has been saved by liberalism, but Frances demurs, refusing to allow this woman, this outsider, to pass judgment on her tribe, even if she left them long ago to wander the desert alone.

Is this Stockholm Syndrome, the lasting hold of a powerful cult(ure) that never really leaves you? Is it hypocrisy of the highest order? She was happy enough to spin that rainbow-tinted tale to obtain a book contract. Or does Frances instinctively call bullshit on facile myth-making, be it from megachurch pastors or self-congratulatory television hosts?  Tullock and Winters leave the audience with a lot to discuss after the show.

“What you’re focusing on is the escape,” Frances pushes back, “but, what nobody talks about is what happens after the escape.” And here the authors press on the weakest spot of a secular liberal society that will cheer you emerging from the closet, but doesn’t really care if you live or die once you are out. It’s the kind of liberation an acrobat feels when performing a high-wire routine without a net.

“The church was the last time I had a group of people for whom it was implied that, well, that they would take care of me,” Frances confesses earlier in the play. At the same time, we hear an excerpt from her book that describes an afternoon when her parents tricked her into undergoing an exorcism—a physical and mental trauma that she will never forget, all justified under the banner of care.

Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God is the dramatic equivalent of watching a spinning coin. Heads and tails blend together and we have no idea which side will land up. That confusion and uncertainty feels like a quintessential American experience right now.