Review: Burnout Paradise Has Audiences Jumping Up and Cheering

As we charge toward the holiday season, you might already be feeling the strain of overwork and overcommitment, always juggling multiple tasks with very little energy left over for yourself. When you’re exhausted, say on Thanksgiving, maybe you really want to relax with a beer and watch athletes push themselves to their physical limits.

The extravagant masochists of Pony Cam know this and have cleverly harnessed that ancient human desire for their outrageous live game show, Burnout Paradise, now making its North American debut at St. Ann’s Warehouse. It’s the most fun you’re likely to have with experimental theater this season.

Based in Melbourne, Pony Cam describes itself as a “collective,” meaning they collectively write, direct, design, and perform all their shows — a lovely idea that no drama student can escape, but is it the best way to produce an art form that is already so collaborative? “Everything we do as best friends and worst enemies,” a performer notes at the top of the show. And we really feel the latter when we understand exactly what this show entails.

The set has four treadmills, each with a different label: “survival,” “admin,” “performance,” and “leisure.” Depending on the treadmill the performer occupies, they must either cook a three-course meal for two lucky audience members, fill out a grant application, re-create a childhood performance, or perform a to-do list of leisure activities — all while running on a treadmill.

Our four contestants are Hugo Williams, Claire Bird, Dominic Weintraub, and William Strom. And while that order corresponds to their designated treadmill in the first part of the show, there are four quarters and, after briefly pausing to water-up to the Sheena Easton song “9 to 5,” they rotate. During the intervals, our host Ava Campbell records the distance run by each performer. They must collectively outdo the previous highest distance (12.8 miles at my performance) and complete all tasks or the viewers will be offered a refund. The stakes are real.

The performers are already warming up when we enter, stretching on the treadmills and eyeing one another as track and field athletes might before an Olympic relay. Even in this avowedly collective effort I sensed an element of competition. I immediately knew my money was on William, whose cocky grin and wiry frame telegraphs a competitor not easily daunted. Of course, I was impressed by Claire’s Billie Jean King glasses and Hugo’s bleach-blond hair, a sure mark of confidence. But none of them possess the unflappable cool of Dominic as he attempts to change from running shorts into a speedo without flashing the audience — again, all while running on a treadmill.

The spectacle is about as absurd as you might imagine, made more chaotic as Ava takes Gatorade orders and sells merch during the performance. The performers can’t complete these tasks without help from the audience, and the Brooklyn crowd proves more than happy to oblige. They shout commands and the audience responds with laughter (but also quite a bit of help).

We cheer when William rings the bell to announce, “order’s up,” and when Claire downs an entire beer on the leisure treadmill. As the performers sweat it out, pushing their bodies to exhaustion, records are broken and prizes are won — with bets (like our wager on a refund) lost. The experimental theater seems to have discovered how to be fun: Become sports.

While I’m sure these good collectivists would deny harboring a sense of competition with one another, they cannot deny that this is a show designed make them compete with their past selves and triumph — or your money back.

I was fortunate enough to attend a performance at which the foursome shattered its previous record by 0.7 miles, news William received with a roar of joy and adrenaline. But the look in Hugo’s eyes was terror mixed with a resigned recognition that he’s chosen the path of most resistance, and it only gets harder from here. But isn’t that the way we’re all expected to live in our metrics-driven society?

Surely someone will be counting the number of eyeballs on this review and measuring it against previous traffic to determine whether the time has come to replace me with an AI text generator. So it’s harder, better, stronger, faster — until we are dead. Burnout Paradise is a far more delightful way to receive that lesson than learning it from Samuel Beckett’s ghouls.

Pony Cam might just be my new favorite theater company. It should be celebrated for its unflagging commitment to collaboration, play, and cardiovascular health.