In a tour-de-force performance, Jen Tullock embodies multiple characters, interweaving each of their narratives to piece together a fractured recollection of a popular essayist’s alleged childhood abuses by an ultrareligious community.

Playwrights Horizons (Artistic Director Adam Greenfield, Managing Director Casey York) presents the world premiere of Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God, co-written by Jen Tullock (Severance) and Frank Winters (Student Body), performed by Tullock, and directed by Jared Mezzocchi (The Wind and the Rain), October 2–26, 2025 (opening October 13), in Playwrights Horizons’ Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 West 42nd St, 4th floor).

In this intermittently heart-wrenching and darkly funny new play, Tullock, Winters, and Mezzocchi craft a story about revisionist history and the lies we tell ourselves in order to survive. When a popular essayist known for her searing takedowns of modern Christianity releases a book detailing her upbringing as a gay kid in the evangelical South, she is confronted by the subject of one of her stories: the woman she fell in love with on a Christian mission trip to Poland eighteen years earlier, who claims the stories are false.

The nonlinear, fragmentary, and unreliable nature of memory reaches a fever pitch as Tullock, Winters, and Mezzocchi ask: what control do we have over our own stories, and how much is purely ours to tell?

To write the play, Tullock teamed with Winters, whom she describes as her “favorite playwright long before [they] began working together.” They entered the process with trust and vulnerability already established through a deep friendship, which allowed them to, per Winters, “treat a lifetime of [Jen’s] own experiences like a big slab of clay from which we shaped this fictional story.”

Mezzocchi brings this precisely written portrait of the past’s frenetic presence onto the stage, immersing audiences in the sensation. Operating multiple cameras and live looping systems, Tullock expertly plays a full cast of characters in a performance that blurs the line between reality and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.

Audiences who know Tullock from her role as Devon on Apple TV’s Severance will see her transform into a caped, Evita-obsessed Polish 10-year-old; an overbearing Los Angeles literary agent; a young religious leader; the protagonist’s mother, described as “Mary Kay Place in a full face of drugstore makeup”; and many others.

Tullock says, “I was really interested in literalizing one’s attempt at controlling their own narrative—making sure that every prop, camera, and narrative pivot are devices used by our protagonist to carefully curate a version of her own story, until they no longer can. It is in that loss of control—and the pain which that control attempts to avoid—that the story truly lives for me.”

Winters adds, “We wrote the play to be an expressionistic portrait of events, as memory often is. Its structure is meant to make us feel what it’s like to be inside of that. I saw a video that quoted experts in trauma studies saying—and I’m paraphrasing—that trauma is when something happens that’s so disruptive that someone can’t fit it into their story; the narrative of one’s life suddenly doesn’t make any sense. And the way one heals from that trauma is by finding a new story or a new way to incorporate this event into their narrative.”

Mezzocchi notes, “The piece is about a singular body onstage trying with all her might to be additional mediated bodies in space. On film you have point of view, but in theater you have the simultaneity of a mortal body onstage with all of the ways they feel about the characters they portray. It’s that simultaneity we’re creating by having no camera ops besides Jen herself. As the stage moves from an oppressive force to a transformational force, the POV is always coming from within Frances: it’s not voyeurism, it’s interior.”

Playwrights Horizons Artistic Director Adam Greenfield says, “I’ve never seen anything like Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God. I first responded to the play for its story, which deftly weaves narrative lines together, only to then ask us to question everything we know. And then I fell for the writing, which is both sharp and subtle, and structurally innovative in its overlapping interplay between live feed video, recorded video, and live action. But then I saw Jen Tullock perform the play in an intimate workshop, and I was gob-smacked by what one actor is able to conjure on a bare stage. It’s a magic act, a tour de force, and unforgettable.”

Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God is part of a season of works exploring the nature of the group against the backdrop of a fraying nation, highlighting artists new to Playwrights Horizons and supporting the continued work of established artists.

Tickets: Performances take place October 2–26, 2025 at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater (416 W 42nd St, 4th floor). Tickets go on sale August 19. The production opens on Monday, October 13, 2025, at 7pm.