Peggy Hepburn’s 3-Word Review: Active! Stressful! Participatory!
Burnout Paradise is no paradise at all. It’s a self-induced dystopian gameshow, unfolding in real time, formulated to induce a clear-eyed biting critique of the expectations of life at sea in modernity & to pull the audience into its vortex of wicked satire. Game on.
The tortured creatives that concocted this brilliantly demented spectacle is an Aussie performance collective who call themselves Pony Cam. The four performers run on treadmills labeled “Survival”, “Admin”, “Performance”, & “Leisure” for ten minutes at a time, at which point they rotate positions; scores are kept by the genial host, who also keeps time & yells out a countdown, as well as offering Gatorade to anyone in the audience who yells “Gatorade”. The performer on the “Survival” treadmill prepares a three-course meal served to two volunteer audience members; “Admin” applies for an arts grant, the live computer monitor projected onto a giant screen behind; “Performance” acts out a vignette from each performer’s childhood, a formative story for why they got into theatre in the first place; “Leisure” goes through a list of tasks on a whiteboard that require the audience’s aid — this feels the cruelest of comments, that leisure can be broken down into tasks that become themselves work, & work dependent on the support of a community, here complete strangers. If they don’t complete their tasks PLUS run a cumulative 12 miles, they offer the audience a full ticket refund.
The experience is a ticklishly visceral one, intentionally of course. It’s a good time & a bad time all rolled into one: something like life itself, but amplified, poked at, dissected, & mocked. You are challenged right off the bat to make the decision of remaining stubbornly seated or to jump to the aid of the performers, who actively cry out for help & indeed require the audience to participate in order to complete their mission. There was certainly a lot of up-&-down, should-I-or-shouldn’t-I in the rows of the theatre when this reviewer attended. The fact that the performers are on treadmills & running while they do all this renders it comedic but bodily terrifying — they are visibly winded & sweating, & as the show goes on they become covered in various layers of makeup while simultaneously losing more & more clothing, becoming naked clowns, as it were. Living, nowadays, is like this: the requirements of life within a system set for self-destruction can feel like the futile hoop-jumping of a naked clown chasing an imaginary carrot on a treadmill, no?
And oh, were there carrots. Well, onions, to be exact. Remember a meal is being cooked, the theatre filled with the smell of cooking onions. There was a delight in the use of food & liquids, with plenty of spilling throughout. The application for the arts grant had audience members emailing in photos & resumes — this was a major crux of the show, I found. Often the inane haste of our world feels fueled by the fact that we have created a second world: the Internet. We are required to occupy two worlds at once, the meat world & the online one. Talk to any older person & they will express their frustration with this exporting of all things to the ephemeral space of the web. How much space does the Internet occupy? How much acreage? Does it really exist at all? It does, & if you want an arts grant, you better figure out how to use it.
There is a good chance you may see this show for free, since it is fairly likely that they will fail — remember if they don’t succeed you get a refund. Reality is their subject matter, & money makes the world go round. Their engagement with the real world only amplifies the absurdity thereof, & the performance dances on the trigger button for anyone trying to make ends meet AND fulfill any kind of artistic endeavor in New York City / the world at large. Wear your sneakers for this one, folks, & be prepared to get your hands dirty: you’re on the clock, whether you like it or not, inside the theatre & out. Tick, tock.
—Peggy Hepburn
‘Burnout Paradise’ is playing thru December 1st, 2024 at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, New York; inages courtesy of Pony Cam & St. Ann’s Warehouse.