The Brooklyn Rail

David Cale sits, Jen Tullock flits. Cale acts before a static backdrop, Tullock before ever-changing screens. Cale’s character is in the Mountain West, Tullock’s in the Evangelical South.

That final difference is also the clearest unifier between Cale and Tullock’s plays: both concern American regions where queer people remain otherized. Now running on opposite sides of the East River, Cale’s Blue Cowboy (at The Bushwick Starr) and Tullock’s Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God (co-written with Frank Winters at Playwrights Horizons) are both solo shows, but even that similarity is harder to detect in productions that take wonderfully distinct approaches to single-actor staging.

In Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God, acclaimed lesbian author Frances Reinhardt (Tullock) is releasing a memoir to share a clear-eyed account of the spiritual abuse she suffered as a child. Or, it is clear-eyed to her: others recall events differently, question her intentions, and impose their own biases. Deftly portraying various characters—from a smug book launch host to a multitasking literary agent—Tullock creates a solar system of people who revolve around Frances.

Fans call her a queer folk hero; the community she writes about doubts her memory. With Tullock embodying not just Frances but the umpteen characters spinning around her, Frances becomes an amalgamation of what everyone says about her: others’ views of her are inseparable from her lived experience.

Through savvy physicality and accent work, Tullock makes each character distinct. Nonetheless, they start to feel more like cogs than people; each has a contrived reason to challenge Frances, remaining flat despite their contradictions. The homophobic pastor leading Frances’s childhood church claims her memoir will only perpetuate more hate. Frances’s mother denies being abusive before erupting in volatile rage. Even the distractible literary agent sees Frances as a girlboss, but also wants conflicts smoothed over as the moneyed church could sue.

The play wants each character to be a puzzle—as does the production. Director Jared Mezzocchi uses Stefania Bulbarella’s projection and video design to capture characters’ multitudes. Onstage cameras snap Tullock, project her onto screens, and then repeat the same image through overlapping close-ups. This accomplishes two feats: to Frances, the chorus of voices doubting her memoir, and self, will always feel multiplied; to the audience, the refracted images highlight characters’ competing intentions and how slippery it can be to arrive at their essence.

There is a unified, intentional dramaturgy between play and production: through nonlinear storytelling and a rigorous design, Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God wants to pose Frances as a question. However, the gap between who she actually is and who she might be is too narrow, rendering the play watery.

Tullock and Winters’s writing makes it clear that Frances is a truthteller of her own circumstance. In her book, she recounts meeting a woman on a European mission trip from her youth. The two hit it off—or, they at least became close and shared a departing kiss. Maybe this was not an entirely sexual encounter, as the woman made uncomfortable by the memoir’s retelling asserts. But Frances nonetheless saw a queerness in their relationship and wrote about it. That is hard to deny.

The denying of marginalized peoples’ selfhood is certainly realistic in 2025 America. Though more interested in how authoring your own history also means reliving it, Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God must still contend with a protagonist who’s the victim of homophobia—an experience unmatched in arc or gravity compared to the others in Frances’s orbit, who together have more stage time. This establishes a binary of homophobic and progressive characters, which does not make the play preachy, but does make it morally simpler than it aspires to be.

In the play’s carefully constructed universe, not enough was unknown.

Mystery is at the glowing intersection of director Les Waters’s eclectic productions, including David Cale’s Blue Cowboy. To even name the mysteries Waters contends with is to abandon their intention: to forsake elusive definitions, and to greet the quieter parts of yourself that have been shadow companions all along.

Waters has befriended these spectres, often in Lucas Hnath’s plays. The Christians: what of my old life can come with me if I live out a change? The Thin Place: how little of my gift do I reveal before others grasp it, not in their heads but their bones? Dana H.: even when described in painstaking detail, why does my mother’s story feel so distant?

Words afford unfair permanence and unholy approximation. (“I am very mistrustful of words,” Hnath once wrote.) And yet, there is practicality not in defining a mystery’s edges, but breathing beside them.

Cale’s unnamed narrator in Blue Cowboy was beside his own mystery: a sinewy, thirty-nine-year-old cowboy named Will in Sun Valley, Idaho. The narrator does not know Will’s surname, or where he lives, or what the exact tenor of his sexuality is. What the narrator does know is that he went from New York City to Sun Valley, alone, to work on a screenplay, had a chance encounter with Will at a town festival, and spent a few weeks holding him, kissing him, looking at the stars with him, driving for miles with him, and feeding his Australian Shepherd, Shelley.

It is through these concrete acts that Cale opens up a portal, not to a fantasy, but to dormant selves: for the person the narrator can become when away from home, and for the person Will can become when a stranger comes to town.

Perched on a stool before a painted backdrop of the Rockies, with autumnal leaves scattered around an ankle-high stage, Cale cradled the audience. Scruffy, unmomentous, and relaxed in costume designer Kaye Voyce’s dark shirt and slacks, he exuded an avuncular affability: he’s the single gay uncle you’d love to visit in New York, except this time, he was busy visiting himself—that shadow companion—a few time zones away.

That voyage offers audiences a rarity: a sixty-something gay man’s romance. In Mike Mills’s Beginners, Christopher Plummer won an Academy Award for playing Hal, who comes out of the closet and gets a boyfriend after his wife’s death; and, in Abe Koogler’s play Deep Blue Sound, the elder character John pines for another man, a local eccentric; but in Blue Cowboy, the thrusting, stickiness, and comedic preparation in gay sex are made real through Cale’s intricate descriptions.

The narrator explores his less-navigated persona in Idaho without jettisoning who he is: a writer. He is telling a story, after all, and the comedic lines land.

Upon meeting, Will shares the places he’s travelled. “Been to LA, Peru. But not New York City,” he says.

“Peru?” the narrator asks.

“Yeah, I got Peruvian friends.”

Most beautiful in their budding situationship is how each can fully be himself—a writer and a cowboy—without actually understanding the other’s life.

“So, you’re pretty much home all the time in New York? Writin’ at home?” Will asks. Then another question: “What’s the area like, where you live? Is it real built up?”

Oh—Will only knows the narrator in the context of Idaho. They’ve shared so little with each other, but they’ve shared the indescribable.

“She’s my heart,” Wills says of his dog. “You can put that in our story.”

Like Tullock’s play, Cale’s is auto-referential: Tullock grew up gay in Kentucky, Cale met a cowboy in Idaho. Cale also voices Blue Cowboy’s handful of characters, though his cast is smaller. He only needs to shift his lilting British accent into a slightly more baritone, less rounded dialect to switch between narrator and Will.

And at some point, Will’s voice goes away.

Gay characters in prejudicial settings often meet similar ends. Blue Cowboy is not interested in this kind of ending (even if there is a let’s-get-this-out-of-the-way joke about Brokeback Mountain). Death is no conclusion, but, as the narrator must return to New York, neither is life. What lies between—or beyond?

Toward the end of Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God, Frances reconnects with the woman from her mission trip. They dance at a dive. Tullock sways, and, with her hand resting against her own cheek, one dancer becomes two. An illusion.

Cale conjures his own: “Just stay present with him,” he says, bringing Will into the room.

It’s something the narrator says for himself, but perhaps also for us. How long will we stay present with Will? Connection is impermanent, as St. Vincent sang in “Slow Disco”:

Slip my hand 
from your hand, 
leave you dancin’
with a ghost.