Severance’s Jen Tullock Confronts Religion and the Past in Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God

Jen Tullock thought she’d left her evangelical Christian upbringing behind her. Then two things happened: she suffered a ministroke and was forced to shelter in place during a tornado. Her response surprised her. “I found myself praying,” she says. “And when both of those instances had passed and the dust settled, I realized there were some vestiges of that time in my life that I hadn’t really looked at. I was curious about a story that told a really honest and nuanced take of a queer person who leaves a faith system because they have to, but never processes the grief over having left.”

The result, Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God—a solo play written by Tullock with Frank Winters and directed by Jared Mezzocchi—deals with memory, those we leave behind and the things that stay with us. Tullock, one of the stars of the Emmy-winning Apple+ TV series Severance, plays all 11 characters in Playwrights Horizons’ off-Broadway production, notably Frances Reinhardt, a writer on a book tour whose experiences with Christianity are inspired by some of the things Tullock encountered.

“Her first book was a huge success and she’s really built a reputation on being a searing adversary to modern Christianity,” says Tullock. Initially, Frances seems in control of her story, “so the version of the characters we see early in the piece is through Frances’s point of view, until a certain chain of events occurs and she starts to lose control of that narrative.”

In the play, Frances ventures back to her childhood home, where she’s confronted with people whose memories of the past differ from hers—including those of her mother, Raelynn, and of a once-close friend, Agnieszka, now the mother of a young son. (Tullock portrays all three.)

“What the play is trying to examine is people hurting people,” she says. “What it also does is ask, ‘What happens when a traumatized person takes the story they’ve married themselves to in order to survive and uses it to manipulate other people?’”

Cameras are integral to the storytelling—the production uses seven, four of which are small Blackmagic cameras that Tullock operates manually—but she cautions theatergoers not to draw comparisons to Sarah Snook’s recent Broadway hit The Picture of Dorian Gray, another solo show that employed video. “Their use of cameras supported the thesis of that story, which is about opulence and vanity,” Tullock says. “The cameras, in my estimation, intentionally formed a voyeuristic ring around the performer.”

In Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God, it’s “the exact opposite,” she says. “We’re watching one body onstage control the technology herself, and it is less about voyeurism and more about watching someone try and control the story until she can’t anymore. We get to see a tight and well-functioning, well-oiled machine fall apart.”

Also integral to the story is Tullock’s own life. Growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, she attended an evangelical school and a megachurch that had very particular views of who she should be. “My primary and only education was through a Christian lens,” she says. “I was taught that my sole purpose in life was either to further God’s message on Earth or to be a housewife.”

Needless to say Tullock has broken free from that ideology, but in telling her story she wants to make sure she doesn’t hurt her family. “I have a lot of love for my family and the reasons that they chose that community and that faith system,” she says. “They’re not the choices I would make for myself, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to have a lot more empathy and understanding around the fact that we are very different people.”

That’s not to say that she isn’t critical of the damage a dogmatic Christian upbringing can cause.

“Our play really holds the church’s feet to the fire,” Tullock says. But her view isn’t as black-and-white as it once was. “I was really comfortable with the narrative I had married myself to for many decades, which is, they are harmful and I was harmed. And while those things are still in many contexts true for me, I also am interested in looking at my own pain of my upbringing with this slightly more detailed lens. Pun intended.”