Jen Tullock in Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God. Photo: Maria Baranova

My day job is in book publishing, and I’ve got a persistent fascination with the elasticity of the memoir genre and the scandals that periodically emerge. This year alone, we’ve got two: The Salt Path, the author of which has been accused of embezzling money from a job, and The Tell, Oprah Winfrey’s 112th book club pick, about the author’s sexual abuse at the hands of a middle-school teacher nearly forty years ago. As a recent investigation by The New York Times notes, “memoirs . . . are rarely fact-checked” by publishers; writers are presumed to be accurate witnesses to and recounters of their own lives, and there’s no journalistic “both sides” obligation–which means the people on the other side of a memoir such as The Tell don’t have a voice unless someone like The New York Times starts digging, or they’ve got enough financial and cultural power to sue. 

In the case of Never the Twain Shall Meet, the fictional memoir at the heart of the new one-person play Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God, an entire religious institution threatens to marshal its forces against writer Frances Reinhardt’s story: the Northeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky (which, in an art-imitates-life-imitates-art kind of way, appears to be a real congregation in the community where playwright/performer Jen Tullock was raised in an evangelical church). It’s easy to keep seeing them as the bad guys to Frances’s “Queer Folk Hero”–a church that had her exorcized for being gay–but there are other individuals, as well, who have very different takes on the story Frances is telling, and selling. Her family, for example, whom her memoir depicts as physically and psychologically abusive–both in alignment with their church’s teachings on homosexuality and in all the other ways parents can damage their children.  And then there’s the woman Frances talks about falling in love with on a mission trip to Poland (who has since moved to the church’s mission house in Louisville and become a virtual member of Frances’s family). 

As we quickly learn, the emotional truths and the human relationships at the core of Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God are far more nuanced than the way Frances’s book portrayed them. To grapple with the contradictory and complex relationships between Frances, Frances’s public persona, and Frances’s memories, let alone the other people who figure in her narrative, the show built by writer/performer Jen Tullock, writer Frank Winters, and director Jared Mezzocchi is full of fragments, layers, and uncertainties. Multi-character, multi-timeline, and making extensive use of Mezzocchi’s characteristic use of projected live video (he is also a projection designer, but the video design here is by Stefania Bulbarella), the play is a dizzying onslaught of perspectives and counternarratives: intercut scenes, multiple timelines, layers and loops of live-capture video, almost a dozen characters played by Tullock with almost as many accents (her work and Mezzocchi’s made all the more impressive here by the fact that the production credits no dialect coach). There are times when the technology threatens to overtake the human stories–the clashing voices, in both the writing and Tullock’s sharply etched performance, are strong enough to do the work, and I think I would have found the multimedia effects more compelling if used slightly more sparingly.

In “truncating … the physical possibilities of live dialogue,” a program note from Winters and Tullock says, “we were able to pull our protagonist Frances’ journey into sharper focus.” But what was most interesting to me in the early parts of the piece was watching the play circle around Frances, talking about her and hearing her through the persona she constructs in her writing rather than her actual person.

Frances is renowned for her memoirs on queer life, and the play opens with a paean to her work: the host’s introduction to the literary launch of her new book, whose subtitle is “Losing Faith and Finding Myself.” Alongside this laudatory speech—smugly note-perfect in its capture of the tone of such an event—we hear a call from Frances’s agent, at an earlier point in the book’s production cycle: the church Frances writes about got an advance copy, and legal action may ensue, unless Frances can get confirmations from involved parties in the events she describes. After all, truth is the best defense against a defamation suit. 

And while the book event goes on as our frame device, the soothing tones of the moderator (posing questions to Frances and reading excerpts from the book that describe horrifying abuses at the hands of her family) punctuating the action, Frances goes home to Kentucky to seek that confirmation. 

Other members of the family and the church enter the stage, fully and vividly, including: Frances’s brother, Eli, who has remained in Louisville and the larger evangelical community but started his own worship circle, and mother, RaeLynn, who is still very active in Northeast Christian. A high school classmate who’s also gay but has remained in the community; he and his new husband are part of Eli’s circle. Some church officials (the least developed/most plot device-y of the characters; I appreciate their necessity to the story, but they’re definitely given less compassion toward their contradictions than other characters are). And Agnieszka, the Polish missionary for Northeast Christian whose earlier relationship with Frances is at the heart of Frances’s personal narrative, and her son, Grzegorz. Tullock’s performance lets the shorthand of her accent work help crystallize the transitions from one character to another (which are also denoted by a sound/light effect the script calls a “glitch”), but the precision in each character is built on much more than accent. Tullock’s Agnieszka, in particular, is a marvel, physically contained and precise in her speech, yet with a teasing warmth.

It’s through voicemails to Agnieszka that we first hear Frances herself, her neutral west coast accent in distinct contradiction to the Kentucky of her Eli and Raelynn and others, the Polish of Agnieszka, and the Irish of Kenny Weaver, another expat missionary in the church. And the more we see of the “now” Frances, as she tries, with a bit of self-serving deceitfulness, to get Agnieszka in her corner, the more we understand the fissures between her public persona and her private one, between the stories she tells and the stories she lives. The cognitive dissonance–both ours and Frances’s–grows as we see her interact perfectly pleasantly with her mother, juxtaposed with language from the book about Raelynn’s violent physical abuse. “We oversimplify our oppressors at our own peril,” Winters and Tullock write in a program note, and we see that peril playing out here. Is Frances intentionally distorting the story or misremembering it?  Is everyone around her gaslighting her or seeing themselves in the best light? Winters and Tullock’s script keeps harping on the fallibility and incompatibility of memory, and on the way codifying memory changes it. “Just ’cause you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” says Raelynn. “I don’t remember what happened the same way you remember it,” says Agnieszka. “Has writing about it changed your memory?” asks an audience member at the reading. 

The audience questions at the reading form another clever form of framing and contextualization, ranging from unabashed fandom to more pointed and critical interrogations of Frances. Evdoxia Ragkou’s sound design is extremely effective in the way it presents these voices–and it’s moments like this, or like the way Mezzocchi and Bulbarella depict Frances’s appearance in a CNN spot, when the technological aspects really shine. In other scenes, I wasn’t quite sure I understood the meanings implied by the different approaches to film capture and film looping; sometimes the multiplicity of images pulled focus from what was actually happening onstage. 

Which I’m sure is entirely the point–it is the multiple ways to understand Frances’s narrative, the fact that there is truth embedded in everyone’s story here, that is being highlighted. “People are capable of both true horror and profound kindness,” says the program note. Memory is fallible and can be used as a weapon or a balm. Frances can acknowledge the value in a community of faith, even as she’s grown famous writing about its enormous harm. Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God does not offer us the comforting certainties of the true believer, but it’s clearsighted about both the value and the cost of that comfort and that certainty.