This solo play co-written and starring “Severance” actress Jen Tullock is on one level the story of lesbian author Frances Reinhardt, who has written a new book about her abusive childhood in an evangelical household in Kentucky, which has led to national TV interviews but also legal threats by the church that her family attends, 

  It is on another level a multimedia show directed by pioneering projection designer Jared Mezzocchi that incorporates live video in multiple and multiplying angles produced by six cameras, and separate audio,  to enable Tullock to perform as almost a dozen different characters, sometimes simultaneously, along two different timelines. 

 Many theatergoers, forced to sort through this virtuosic display in order just to figure out what’s going on,  might feel that the stagecraft overcomplicates the story. But that may be the point. The complicated storytelling mirrors how much more complicated the story is than it may initially seem, the multiple angles of the camerawork serve as a metaphor. In “Nothing Can Take You From The Hand of God,”  the truth is elusive, fragmented, even ultimately to Frances herself.

We learn this bit by bit, with each character whom Frances re-encounters in a trip back home in Louisville to address the church’s concerns about her new book, which is entitled “Never the Twain Shall Meet: Losing God and Finding Myself.”  Her literary agent Aubrey (who is deliciously satirized saying things like “You crazy genius I am obsessed with you”) believes that “the Evangelical Mafia” object to “the queer stuff.” But it turns out that the objection comes from Agnieszka Szymborska, a Polish woman whom Frances met while doing missionary work for her church, and is now living in the home of Frances’ mother. To Frances, Agnieszka was her “first love,” as she tells a CNN interviewer (and as she has apparently written in her book.) But, when they meet in person, Agnieszka says to her “I don’t remember what happened the same way that you remember it. I wish that I did. I’m sorry for that. But it’s not because I would be ashamed. It’s because it did not happen.” – and, when the two discuss the details of their relationship, it is, at least, ambiguous.

There might be similar reactions when we meet her brother Eli, her mother Raelynn, her high school classmate, Clay. She remembers her parents as enlisting a stranger to lock her in a room to perform an exorcism; she remember her brother as doped up on Ritalin and beating the shit out of her; she remembers Clay as bullying her. Are they now reformed – Clay in a gay couple himself – but former abusers in denial? That’s not how they see it. How should we?

Is Jeremy, the new pastor of the old church, friendly and well-meaning, just concerned that nobody gets hurt, or is he oleaginous (Here it seems more the latter: “I’ve never like the word, ‘defamation.’ Makes me… well, it makes me sad. Because I want the memories that you have from being a part of our congregation, a member of our family, to remain good memories..”)

Most bracing is our realization that Frances herself questions the narrative of her life that the TV interviewers readily embrace –that she escaped from religious extremism to unmitigated freedom. “The thing is, every sense of joy and reason was God. And then it went away,” she says. “I’m homesick, and I can’t go home.”

Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God
Playwrights Horizons through November 16
Running time: 70 minutes no intermission
Tickets: $63 – $118
Co-written by Jen Tullock and Frank Winters
Directed by Jared Mezzocchi
Performed by Jen Tullock
Scenic design by Emmie Finckel, lighting design by Amith Chandrashaker, sound design by Evdoxia Ragkou, projection and video design by Stefania Bulbarella 
Photographs by Maria Barinova