Ludruk Revisited: An Epistolary Interview with James L. Peacock

Extract

Hélène Bouvier (HB): How did you first become interested in theatre?

James L. Peacock (JLP): Most interesting to me, though perhaps less interesting to anyone else, is the question, ‘Why should I, the son of an engineer (one feature shared with Victor Turner whose mother, however, was an actress), study theatre?’ I had no background in it, and I had hardly even seen a play before I went to Java. I think I know a source. It is during World War II, my father is preparing to invade Normandy, while my mother, my sister and I have moved in with her widowed mother in rural Alabama. My mother's sister, a concert pianist, and her sister's son had also moved in because the sister's husband, also a pianist, was also overseas. This boy and my sister play act. I don't. I make things. Every morning I put on my shorts (nothing else, no shoes, no shirt) at the crack of dawn and go outside to play in the yard, especially the ‘sand pile’ where I construct forts and tunnels. (The one dream I remember is of finding a soldier I lost in the sand: my absent father, perhaps?) While my cousin and sister play, sometimes I watch. We grow up. He goes to New York and becomes an actor and musician. I become an anthropologist.

I have never acted in a play (except a pornographic skit in my college fraternity, in which I was a great success among the ‘brothers'), but I have always stared at people (today, women, but when I was growing up, men), and I would draw them, not while looking at them but later, alone—as teenager cartoon fantasies, like the Phantom or Superman, except more human.