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.
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