“The Sunday School Project”
Liggett Studio
June 8, 2025
As someone with not a little residual trauma from attending Rhema Bible Church’s Sunday school as a very young child, I had to gird up the loins of my mind (1 Peter 1:13) to walk into Liggett Studio for “The Sunday School Project.”
Developed by performance and theatre artist Jessica Davenport (a former Tulsan) through the Creative Exchange Fund, CACHE, and The Medium in Northwest Arkansas, “The Sunday School Project” is an immersive performance art piece that faithfully reconstructs a 1980s-era evangelical Sunday School experience. This is a very particular world, well-known to many who grew up around here: the world of the Jesus Movement, which in the ‘70s and ‘80s swept countercultural young adults into a life defined by faith healing, blood atonement, rapture-forecasting, felt puppets, Chick tracts depicting bodies burning in hell, children’s pastors in polyester skirts, and LPs by long-haired music duos whose lives had been changed by a personal relationship with Jesus and a contract with Maranatha! Music.
As a grinning “Sister Rachel” offered me animal crackers and red Kool-Aid (wink) at the door, I entered a space of tangible, hyper-specific memory, which quickly became a fever dream of familiar cognitive dissonance. The performance opened with 30 minutes of free-floating “fellowship and crafts,” and I was grateful for the time to ease into this situation while my limbic system freaked out.