StarJean Tullock of Severance Left Religion and Found God
 |
| A close-up portrait of a woman who is wearing a cream-colored shirt and resting her head on her left hand. |
Jen Tullock’s new solo play, “Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God,” deals with a woman’s relationship with faith, and what it means to be a lesbian in a Christian milieu.Credit...Ye Fan for The New York Times
By Elisabeth Vincentelli
New York Times
For the first time in years, Jen Tullock found herself praying. She was visiting her parents in early 2020, and a tornado came rampaging through their Tennessee town. They had sheltered in the basement, and as the tornado passed over them, Tullock’s parents began praying. So did she.
“I started praying by rote, from a place I did not know existed,” Tullock said in a recent conversation at her Greenwich Village home. “Afterward, I sort of had to look at them and say, ‘Oops, where did that come from?’”
The impulse to pray may not have been a total surprise, since she had grown up in a fervidly Christian household in Kentucky. But as an openly gay woman, she had long left her fraught childhood behind — or so she had thought.
It’s that complicated — to say the least — upbringing and its ramifications into adulthood that now inform her new Off Broadway show, “Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God,” which is at Playwrights Horizons through Nov. 9.
In her most high-profile TV roles, Tullock, 42, has deftly conveyed the supportive warmth of Devon, the sister of Adam Scott’s character in the Apple TV+ series “Severance,” and the languid seductiveness of the 1930s screenwriter Anita in the HBO noir “Perry Mason.” The new play, a solo she wrote with her longtime friend and collaborator Frank Winters, hits much closer to home, dealing with a woman’s reckoning with faith and her past, and what it means to be a lesbian in a Christian milieu.
 | |
Tullock in “Severance.” Credit...Apple TV+ |
“Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God,” running through Nov. 9 at Playwrights Horizons, integrates video that is captured by six cameras.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Tullock, who left the church at 18, said, “The leaders of both the megachurch and the evangelical school I went to talked about ‘homosexual sin’ as one might about mass murder.”
These days she describes herself as “deeply spiritual and deeply embarrassed of that phrase.” Much of the play involves the aftereffects of growing up in a deeply religious Louisville family. “My parents didn’t really want us to have exposure to secular culture,” she said. “I went to evangelical school, so my formal education was through a biblical perspective.”
“As you might imagine,” she continued, “I did not do great on the SATs. They were like, ‘Well, she could read.’”
And now she finds herself in one of the most scrutinized series in popular culture.
“It’s fascinating to hear that story from Jen and then see who she is,” Scott, her “Severance” co-star, said over the phone. “I know I wouldn’t have the strength to become the kind of person Jen is if that were the environment and the 360-degree view of the world that I had.”
While “Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God” is not strictly autobiographical, Tullock allowed that “a lot of moments are inspired by things that did happen.” But, she added, “in both wanting to have the creative freedom to create a new story and also to protect myself and my family, there’s definitely distance in the fiction.”
A production image shows a woman who is wearing a jean top and pants standing in front of large screens. The screens are showing close-up images of the same woman.
 | |
| A production image shows a woman who is wearing a jean top and pants standing in front of large screens. The screens are showing close-up images of the same woman. |
Her grandparents helped open up young Jen’s world by taking her to the local museum and passing on copies of The New Yorker, which she hid under her mattress, and Barbra Streisand CDs. As she recounted those formative years, Tullock took out her phone and pulled up a photo of herself as a child wearing a suit, dressed as the novelist Donna Tartt. “I look like I’m running Secret Service for my own grandfather,” she said, laughing.
She also found writing to be another escape hatch, and she kept at it. In recent years she wrote the screenplay for and starred in the 2019 film “Before You Know It” with Hannah Pearl Utt, for example. In 2023 she created the stand-up show “You Shall Inherit the Earth!” (available on demand), about her experience having a mini-stroke a couple of years ago. Undergoing an M.R.I., she had found herself praying again.
While reading and writing were her secret garden, performance was something of a family affair: She and her parents sang with the worship group of their megachurch congregation. “To me, my mom was like Celine Dion because she was up there on the Jumbotron singing and was very charismatic and funny,” Tullock said. “I think being onstage was something I felt comfortable with from a young age.”
Her ability to access both creative outlets has come in handy on the “Severance” set. “Her thoughts were always incredibly helpful,” the series creator Dan Erickson said in a phone interview, adding that he valued “that she speaks writer, so she can articulate what she’s getting at in a way that’s really helpful.”
It is not coincidental that the central character of “Hand of God,” Frances, is a writer, with a new book titled “Never the Twain Shall Meet: Losing God and Finding Myself.” Tullock wanted Frances to have that occupation because she wanted somebody “who had become successful at this and had already monetized their version of this story.” Then, she continued, she could explore “what happens when one timeline and one version of truth start to bump against another in real time.”
That refracted view is reflected in the play’s staging by the multimedia-theater maven Jared Mezzocchi. He and Tullock met in 2007 when he was a graduate student in performance and interactive media arts at Brooklyn College and she was an assistant there. They immediately forged a friendship that has endured through decades, moves and diverging career paths. After Tullock started working on “Hand of God” during the Covid lockdown, inspired by the tornado scare, she reached out to him about collaborating on it, and they reconnected professionally. The partnership was further renewed last year when she appeared in his immersive staging of the Sarah Gancher play “The Wind and the Rain: A Story About Sunny’s Bar” in Brooklyn.
Like many of Mezzocchi’s projects, this new production integrates video, captured by six cameras — some operated by Tullock and some operated remotely. What’s exciting, she said, “is when people are using the tech as a dramaturgical tool and it’s part of the fabric of the story.”
“Jared and I said from Day 1, if there’s ever a moment where we could tell the story without the cameras, then we’re doing it wrong,” she added. (She mentioned the recent Broadway production of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as an example of doing it right.)
 |
| A portrait of Jen Tullock, who is wearing red pants and a white shirt with pink fringe, who is looking up while seated on stairs. |
Though Tullock has a painful history with her parents, she says she is proud of them “because they’ve worked really hard to meet me where I am.”Credit...Ye Fan for The New York Times
“We have a visual language in the play where there are rules like, for example, when Frances is onstage, there’s not video of her — she can’t be perceived,” Tullock explained.
The setup demands extreme precision from the performer, who must constantly hit visual and audio cues as she switches from embodying one character to another. As we were talking, Tullock stood up and, while holding a copy of the script, noted myriad little drawings and doodles she uses as mnemonic devices to memorize the lines and prompts.
Still, Mezzocchi said, “the challenges are intentionally theatrical challenges, like how she frames herself, how she whips something around.”
“That is no different than using props” he continued. “My design team was like, ‘What if she’s off-frame?’ And I’m like, ‘That’s great, just what theater does.’”
Ultimately, the goal is for the audience to focus on a very personal, entirely human story of reckoning with how one is shaped and how one changes, or not: How do you make peace with the past? Tullock says her younger brother will be attending opening night, and she would love for her parents, who she says are now supportive of her queerness, to see the show eventually. “There is a lot of pain in our history, a lot of deep pain,” she said. “And also I’m proud of my parents because they’ve worked really hard to meet me where I am.”
“We’re trying to tell an honest version of this story that isn’t about a good guy or a bad guy,” she added. When she was in her 20s and 30s she was “obsessed with irony,” Tullock wrote to me later in an email. “I was just a drunk little prick trying to emulate the exact same shows and artists I’d claim to be above because I was scared and insecure.”
The show perhaps represents a new stage of acceptance. “I hope people know that it is like a letter of forgiveness,” she said. “I’ve made so many things out of anger, and this is not one of them.”
Comments