One night last month at Astor Place Theater, audience members hurriedly hustled onto and off the stage to help four sweat-drenched, exhausted performers jogging on treadmills complete various tasks: shave one actor’s neck, solve a Rubik’s Cube and whip up a pasta dinner from scratch for two audience members to feast on and rate.
The mood in the room was electric and giddy, yet also panicked: If the performers didn’t meet their run time goal by the end of the evening, the paying strangers in the audience would get refunds.
It may sound like a nightmare, but “Burnout Paradise” is a real Off Broadway show. It’s endurance theater, not in terms of length — performances are about 75 minutes — but of raw physicality, as many as eight times a week. Its cheeky tagline: “The longest running show in NYC.”
For each performance, all five members of the Australian collective Pony Cam — Hugo Williams, Claire Bird, Dominic Weintraub, Ava Campbell and William Strom — alternate running on treadmills, with one acting as M.C. (and merch seller and Gatorade procurer).
Their goal is to complete tasks in four “worlds”: Survival (making and serving that pasta); Admin (writing a grant proposal); Performance (re-enacting childhood dance routines, for one); and Leisure (applying lipstick, among about 30 other menial activities listed on a whiteboard).
Remember OK Go’s viral video for its song “Here It Goes Again,” the one with the bandmates executing precision moves on unremitting treadmills? It’s like that but more unhinged. A real-time nail-biter, too.
“We all don’t know what is too much, we don’t understand what our breaking point is,” Williams said during an interview last month with his castmates at the theater, where the show is scheduled to run through June 28.
“We are always aspirationally chasing the place that is beautiful on the horizon,” he said. “That’s the thing where we want to get to, that’s the reason we suffer, in terms of the process of art making.”
Is the show a doomer commentary on the daily hamster wheel of life? Or just family-friendly, turn-off-your-brain fun? What is the show about?
“The thing we’re most frustrated by in theater is when it tells you what it’s about,” Weintraub said.
Pony Cam formed in 2019, making shows in nontraditional spaces like gardens and a shopping center parking lot and asking audiences “to feel theatrical feelings and community but without necessarily having to be seated in a theater,” Williams said.
The company modeled itself after the playful but brainy dramaturgy of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Gob Squad and other experimental companies known for their collective practice and horseplay storytelling. Williams said Pony Cam wants to give audiences “free rein to see how autonomy creates real effects on the performers, and how we treat them back” — theater as acts of service.
They first performed “Burnout Paradise” in 2023 at a festival in Melbourne, Australia, their home base. The title isn’t a reference to the racing video game, or to where Gen X stoners hung out after class. Williams said it was simply the name the company chose on deadline for an application for the Melbourne Fringe Festival.
It stuck, he added, because the company found that burnout alluded to “something that we could see as collectively joyful as a result of our mutual exhaustion.”
More than just a money’s-worth show is at stake. The performers track their running distance per treadmill during the show, and the numbers are added up on a whiteboard for the crowd to determine if all four met their goal.
“It’s this constant negotiation during the show of being, like, instead of running seven miles per hour, I have to now run eight,” Williams said.
As the show speeds to its conclusion, audiences rally hard to help the troupe complete their missions. If the performers don’t collectively beat their personal-best run time, audience members are entitled to their money back. The fail rate is about 60 percent, though not all audience members take the money. (The offer is made at the top of the show, but people must ask for their money on the way out.)
“We wanted the show to have real, material stakes, not just theatrical ones,” Weintraub said. “If we fail, there is an actual financial cost to us, which makes our risk genuine and asks the audience to feel that too.”
Campbell recalled how one man loudly shamed people who took the refund — not that it stopped them. Some audience members have even reimbursed the company for any money they returned.
This is the second New York visit for “Burnout Paradise,” after a short run at St. Ann’s Warehouse in 2024; the show has toured in the United States and to Ireland and Canada. What sets New York apart is that it’s a city that knows and even thrives on burnout.
“If you’re not careful, it can destroy you,” Bird said. “I think we can provide a mirror, a critique and a space to reflect on that pounding-pavement culture.”
Preshow prep varies. Williams blasts his legs with a massage gun; others do a lot of stretching. About five minutes before the doors open, Strom delivers a group “coach talk,” as Campbell put it.
“It’s tough love,” she said. “He berates us and tells us to do better. It’s humorously mean.”
After the show “we can barely chat to each other, our eyes are, like, wide open,” Williams said, adding: “You see the damage of your body.” There are showers, bandages, more stretches.
Williams said the grueling duties of “Burnout Paradise” are worth it when he spots a poster for the show on the street and is overtaken with “a Dorian Gray kind of hauntingness.”
“There’s so much privilege in that, and it’s not lost on us in any way,” he said. “How unbelievably lucky we feel, considering where this came from, and the chances that this could ever occur.”
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