The machinery of imagination is a delicate thing, easily gummed up. It’s vital that it works smoothly at the theater, where the whole enterprise is an agreement between the people making a show and the people watching it: The artists do some pretending, and the audience completes the picture by filling in the blanks.
In the new solo play “Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God,” Jen Tullock, best known for the Apple TV series “Severance,” gives a quietly blazing performance, embodying multiple roles in a fragmented tale about family and religion, homophobia and belonging, failures of love and failures of memory. Believing her is no trouble.
The show’s abundant live video of Tullock, conversely, is an obstacle to imagination. Written by Tullock and Frank Winters, the play began as a screenplay, so it is understandable that the use of multiple cameras is built into its staging. But given the combined strength of their script, her performance and the other design elements in Jared Mezzocchi’s production for Playwrights Horizons, that impulse feels like a remnant that should have been jettisoned.
Inspired by Tullock’s evangelical Christian upbringing in Kentucky, “Nothing Can Take You” is the multilayered story of Frances Reinhardt, a lesbian author. Her new book, “Never the Twain Shall Meet: Losing God and Finding Myself,” which includes an account of romance with another young woman on a missionary trip, has drawn a legal threat from her childhood congregation back in Louisville.
So Frances returns to her hometown to salvage the situation. Her mother, Raelynn, whom she blames for harrowing abuse, and her brother, Eli, live there still, as does Agnieszka, who was Frances’s first love. All of them remain practicing Christians, all of them care about her, and none of them remember the past in quite the way she has painted it.
“Now let me ask you a question,” the pastor of the church says, with folksy menace. “Do you ever worry if you made any of it up?”
Across the country in Los Angeles, Frances’s agent is in a sustained low-key panic at the threat to the project, barraging her with phone calls and dictated texts. “I know you are literally in the film ‘Deliverance’ down there,” she says, but the reality is more evolved and complex.
In Louisville, the mellowly bro-style Eli now leads his own less rigid Christian fellowship, and the comically chatty Raelynn is proud of Frances’s professional success. Agnieszka has a show-tune-singing little boy, and Frances’s old guy friend has a husband.
“I see y’all’s mother from time to time,” the friend says. “She even came to the wedding.”
Layered throughout, in intermittent voice-over (also by Tullock), is the sound of a polished Southern California interviewer leading an onstage conversation with Frances about her book.
A play like this is a showcase for range, which Tullock, in the shape-shifting tradition of Anna Deavere Smith, demonstrates unequivocally and with an impressive array of accents. It is also a challenge to empathy: Can one actor find the humanity in each of the many characters? Tullock does not play favorites, and Frances — who grew up comforted by faith and community — is as flawed and stumbling a mortal as any of them.
On Emmie Finckel’s set, the well-crafted lighting (by Amith Chandrashaker), projections (by Stefania Bulbarella, who also designed the video) and sound (by Evdoxia Ragkou) help denote when Tullock becomes a new character, and orient us inside the scenes. These elements facilitate imagination.
When I say that the cameras do the opposite, it’s not that they make the audience seem extraneous, like last season’s Broadway production of “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” a multicharacter solo show that felt to me like watching a film shoot. Tullock is so alert to the room that she ad-libbed an acknowledgment, in character, when someone’s phone went off.
But she is right there in front of us, in a small theater with just eight rows of seats. Live video of her takes up an enormous amount of attentional bandwidth while solving no storytelling or sightline problem. And it is too literal not to distract the mind’s eye.
This production recalled for me the oft-quoted advice attributed to Coco Chanel: “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off.” The video is the bauble the play doesn’t need.
Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God
Through Nov. 9 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.
The post Jen Tullock Multitasks in ‘Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God’ appeared first on New York Times.
