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Journeys and Desires: Notes on Pylon
by Taylor Donnelly
All coming-of-age stories are journeys at heart. It is singularly appropriate, then, that Pylon begins in a car. This play is a journey about that journey, about fellow-travelers, forks in the road, and landmarks, including the traffic cones scattered throughout the first half. Yet this journey is mapped out mostly in hindsight. “I’m building this all up with the gravity it’s gained over time,” Mike says in the first scene. Gravity can’t exist before time has passed. In the moment of living, we hurtle from one moment of potential gravity to the next, in an arcless free-fall, not knowing which experiences will turn out to be our emotional landmarks until the journey is over. In Pylon, Mike, Connor, and Jake (and to a lesser extent, Dee) look back on an era in their late adolescence in an attempt to grasp what ended that era and led them out of adolescence permanently.
Adolescence is special. It is also god-awful. As a rule, if a play (/book/film/etc.) emphasizes the god-awful aspect of adolescence, it is a comedy. If it emphasizes the special, it is tragedy. Either we lose something irreplaceable in the fall from childhood, or we gain something essential in the ascendance to adulthood. Or, as a non-binary alternative, we neither lose nor gain, but rather survive adolescence, with mixed results and mixed feelings.
Pylon explores that third route. Neither comedy nor tragedy, the play approaches the notion of “coming of age” with as much acid as tenderness, and as much bewilderment as either. The narrators look back on their overlapping journeys into adulthood without exactly understanding what happened. Mike, Connor, and Jake circle around some central key, each with a (sometimes competing) part of the puzzle; yet they are never quite able to comprehend the central catalyzing force that propelled them (however mixedly) out of childhood.
That force is desire with a capital Dee. The high school years are a primordial stew of desires, not to mention secrets, fears, misdemeanors, and movie marathons. Typically, we remember adolescence as the time when we feel everything most intensely, especially desire. The yearning for that one person, that first person – you, reader, rustling your program, do not pretend you have forgotten that feeling. Such desire is searingly fierce. But there is also the desire to be included. Dee wants to be included in the “coning” just as much as each of the men wants, in some way, to be included in her heart. The physical, emotional, and social turmoil of adolescence can be deeply isolating; that is why no one who survives it has forgotten who their friends were. Looking back on the journey, where the car was going turns out to be so much less important than who was in it with us.
The characters in Pylon lie; they posture; they lash out and then retreat; they try to stand out; they try to fit in; they care deeply and complicatedly about each other and pretend not to so they won’t seem vulnerable. Of course they do; they are adolescents. But if our narrators enter a state of (mixed and bewildered) maturity, it is because they learn that pure desire is mere infancy. Coming of age requires the realization that no individual is sufficient; no single perspective can tell the whole story. There are complex, interrelating ties between people that are stronger than desire. Though desire inevitably lingers….
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