Theatergoers who enjoy audience participation shows where they can easily get into the action will get quite a kick out of Burnout Paradise. Opening last Thursday at the Astor Place Theatre, the home of Blue Man Group for 34 years, Burnout Paradise is an increasingly frenetic mash-up of physical endurance and spontaneous comedy involving people sprinting on treadmills while multitasking everyday activities. This nifty 75-minute madhouse attraction is created and performed by Pony Cam, an Australian theater collective that has galloped triumphantly across several fringe festivals around the globe with their show enroute to New York City.
Here’s how the event proceeds: Four nice-looking individuals in brief sports gear briskly ramble upon separate treadmills during a series of 12-minute contests. The ultimate purpose of each treadmill station is the completion of a specific task by the end of the show. For instance, the outcome from the station labeled Survival is the cooking and serving of a three-course meal. The night I caught the event the cuisine was Italian. Salad was tossed as pasta boiled and red sauce made from scratch bubbled on adjacent burners, as all the while the different chefs – everybody switches their stations between bouts – jogged upon that treadmill.
Even as all that was going on, the troupers hustling on the treadmill station at the far left, labeled Leisure, need to accomplish a whiteboard to-do list of dozens of tasks: Wrap a gift, wax off hair, paint nails, juggle, play Bingo, drink wine, shoot hoops, duck hunt (you read that one right), fix Rubik cube, for instances. The creation and filing of an arts grant proposal and the re-creation of childhood memories like swimming and a ballet recital are developed among the other stations.
[Read Roma Torre’s ★★★★☆ review of the production’s 2024 visit here.]
Your participation in all of these different activities is kindly requested. “If you feel the urge to help,” says Ava Campbell, who explains these doings (among other competitive details not cited here) to the audience, “please do!”
Altruistic or otherwise, numerous spectators raced up the aisle and onto the stage to assist the performers — for better or worse — to frequently hilarious results. Not incidentally, I stayed seated, and nobody tried to shame me into participating. Let’s detail little else about these honestly Hellzapoppin-ish doings, because every performance will prove to be a somewhat differently funny experience depending upon the crowd. Belying the apparent modesty of its homemade visuals, the production is strategically staged with live video close-ups of specific activities as they happen and boosted further by Cody Spencer’s ace sound design.
Joining Campbell, who graciously serves trays of Gatorade to the audience during the contests, are treadmill artistes Claire Bird, William Strom, Dominic Weintraub and Hugo Williams. The company’s cheerful sense of humor appears as keen as their seemingly casual athleticism, so their response to whatever spectators do likely will yield abundant laughter. God help them, though, when the parents of tweens and teens find out about this show.
Of course, beyond its immediate attraction as a funfest, Burnout Paradise can also be considered as a satirical commentary upon the everyday drudgery of modern existence, yadda-yadda. Whatever, the show delivers a swift and agreeable serving of escapist entertainment and what’s wrong with that?
