Four performers step onto four treadmills. Over the next hour or so, they must run—while preparing a meal, completing a grant application, presenting a performance, and handling the small chores of daily life. Together, they must also cover a predetermined distance. If they fail, the audience can request a refund.
This is the delirious premise of “Burnout Paradise,” the acclaimed show from Australian experimental theater collective Pony Cam, coming to the Egg in Albany for five performances October 15 through 18. A theatrical obstacle course, aerobic ordeal, and comedy about life under late capitalism, the production turns overwork into spectacle—and eventually asks the spectators to help keep it going.
Each treadmill represents one of four competing demands: survival, administration, performance, and leisure. The performers rotate among them, cooking on one, applying for arts funding on another, entertaining the crowd on a third, and completing such mundane tasks as brushing their teeth and walking the dog on the fourth. All the while, the belts keep moving.
“We each have this same experience of trying to balance these things,” says Pony Cam member William Strom. “The work in the room is a constant negotiation of who’s going to take this moment, who’s going to step up, who’s going to step down. That balancing act very much made its way into the work.”
Pony Cam’s five members met while studying theater at university and formed the company around a “shifting hierarchy,” creating work without a permanent director, playwright, or fixed chain of command. The company’s inspirations include the Anglo-German collective Gob Squad, Elevator Repair Service, and the Wooster Group, all known for dismantling conventional theatrical forms.
The treadmills came before the metaphor. Emerging from the pandemic feeling depleted, the performers bought four machines with the company’s limited funds and began improvising. “Sometimes we do the thing before we know its meaning,” Strom says. “We gather the elements of a project and look at them together, trying to figure out what they already say before we try to say anything.”
What the treadmills said became increasingly apparent: No matter how hard the performers work, more work awaits. Their exhaustion is genuine, and their success varies according to how they slept, what they ate, and what reserves they can summon that evening. “We love playing with risk,” says company member Ava Campbell. “The most obvious thing to risk is our bodies in real time.”
That risk pulls the audience into the show. At first, spectators watch the escalating bedlam. Then a performer asks for assistance. Someone may need to peel vegetables, fetch a prop, or take over a task so the runner can accumulate more distance. A pause follows as people glance around, waiting to see who will volunteer.
“They realize we’re not asking them to get up and make a fool of themselves,” Strom says. “We’re asking for assistance because we genuinely need help.”
Once the first person rises, the relationship changes. The audience becomes a temporary support system, and its efficiency can determine whether Pony Cam meets its goal. Campbell has found that audiences express their enthusiasm differently from country to country, but help always arrives. “The humanity of people wanting to help is universal,” she says.
Amid the cheering, sweat, food, paperwork, and treadmill choreography, “Burnout Paradise” turns a familiar private condition into collective action. The fun comes first. Its implications tend to catch up later. “People leave saying, ‘That was awesome,’” Strom says. “Then a couple of days later, they say, ‘That made me think about my life and the systems that are crushing me—and what I should do to change them or escape from under them.’”
