“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.
I remember this tinny hi-fi system, this orange and brown afghan, this song that goes “He’s a rock that doesn’t roll.” I remember the blended smell of crayons and Aqua Net, the overbright lights. I remember watching grown-ups show me how to cut out and arrange felt Bible figures, lead songs and prayers that made my heart soar. I remember love and damnation offered with the same hand. I remember wondering what went on in the other rooms at church, what illness or horror was being cast out, whether it would get us next, us kids in the Sunday School room with our paper cups of Tang, or our parents down the hall in Bible study, and what we would do, all alone, if we were spared and they weren’t.
I felt it all over again in “The Sunday School Project.” Davenport grew up in one of these churches; family ties are still present there. Her memory of this world is complex and bittersweet: comforting, scary, full of confusion, full of love and joy. “The Sunday School Project” honors that complexity by presenting the experience as purely as she remembers it, without irony or contempt or, for the most part, commentary.