Critic Roundup: BURNOUT PARADISE, WE ARE YOUR ROBOTS, STRATEGIC LOVE PLAY — Review

BURNOUT PARADISE 

In the Burnout club, we all fam. Australian company Pony Cam’s batshit-wild and tremendously fun new show is, mostly, an excuse for wild and unhinged levels of silliness. But Burnout Paradise is also an oddly moving testament to genuine camaraderie—to the cathartic relief of simply having bro’s back, no matter what. 

Over a 65 minute running time, four tireless performers fulfill a series of escalating tasks while continuously running on treadmills. The tasks vary from submitting a grant application, to dying their hair, to cooking a three-course meal. From moment one, the audience is enlisted to run up on stage and help out. Participation is voluntary, but even the shyest among us will feel compelled to run up and lend a hand. We all have a duty to one another, don’t we?

A hit at Edinburgh Fringe, Burnout feels still in search of a grand finale—one last escalation of crazy that never quite arrives. But the piece is nonetheless a delight, a joyful burst of collective mania. 

WE ARE YOUR ROBOTS

What if HAL 9000 serenaded you with smooth, beguiling jazz? That’s the welcome question posed by Ethan Lipton’s thoughtful, acerbically funny new musical We Are Your Robots, created and performed by Lipton and his longtime “Orchestra” (Eben Levy, Vito Dieterle & Ian Riggs) and co-presented by Theatre for a New Audience & Rattlestick Theater at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center. 

Lipton’s smartest move is casting himself as a crooning android servant. “We are here to help,” Lipton assures us, insisting in wry patter between each catchy tune that robots are not looking to replace humanity—except, of course, in all the areas where they already have. Liptons wry, detached style is a perfect match for the assignment. 

The ambivalence of many recent theatrical works exploring AI (McNeal and Bioadapted among them) has proven uninteresting. At times, Robots has a similar uncertainty—and of course, no-one knows the future. But the form of the piece suggests a clear perspective. Each time Lipton poses a new question to the audience, he nods and repeats back our invented response, plucked out of total silence. Humanity’s presence is no longer, strictly speaking, required. 

STRATEGIC LOVE PLAY

There is a certain brand of play that I associate strongly with the “Royal Court crop”—multiple generations of darkly funny, fucked-up Brits who got their start at the London bastion of new writing. Take Simon Stephens’ Heisenberg, Mike Barlett’s Cock, Nick Payne’s Constellations, Dennis Kelly’s Boys and Girls. These plays tend to have small casts and a low-concept premise (love triangle, chance encounter) that conceals far grander thematic ambitions. 

Miriam Battye, another Royal Court alumnus, puts her own spin on this mini-genre with her quick-witted two-hander Strategic Love Play. First seen in the 2023 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and then on a UK tour, Love Play is simple on the surface: one man, one woman, sat across a table, opening up some wounds on a date gone horribly sideways. But through a simple setup, Battye tackles huge questions: love, loneliness, isolation, survival, seeking meaning in the vast unknown. 

The result is highly entertaining for a time, but winds up a muddle. Leads Michael Zegen and Heléne Yorke find a quick, witty repartee. The more this “Man” and “Woman” dislike each other, the more they like each other—a darkly horny little journey that’s fun to follow. The central questions are relatable: are they still talking out of openness, or desperation? Is that feeling that tells us “Not this one” a voice of reason, or one of fear?

And underneath all that relatability, an unsettling question—what are we really watching? Is all of this literally happening? Arnulfo Malonado empty, dreamlike Brooklyn bar set suggests otherwise. As the pair’s backstories fill in, the details don’t always seem to add up. It starts to feel like we’re not really watching one date, but rather every kind of date, all of them happening all at once.

But that suggestion of a larger canvas does not find any payoff. Battye redirects to the familiar questions: could these two find happiness together? Perhaps I’d simply misunderstood the play. I thought it was clear, pretty much from moment one, that this date was doomed; I thought everything that followed was a thought experiment, a gleeful dissection of the impossible aspirations and endless loops the dating gauntlet forces us through. 

In other words: I didn’t think Love Play was really about these two people at all. Evidently I thought wrong. If so, I confess to confusion at why Posner’s staging, with its surreal empty set and Jen Schriever’s ethereal lighting, would create such a non-literal world for an ultimately literal-minded play. 

I was also misdirected by Yorke’s performance, which leans broad (similar to her incredible work on Max’s The Other Two). “Woman” feels in Yorke’s hands more like chaos demon than character, needling “Man” past the point of reason. That broadness turns out to be cultural disconnect rather than a deliberate vision, a result of Yorke overplaying English humor that demanded subtler delivery. 

Holding the whole thing together is Zegen, an often undersung stage performer who here delivers the finest performance of his career. Zegen hits his punchlines with restraint, finding a natural nerdiness without overdoing the awkwardness. He embodies what Battye’s play and Posner’s production never quite find—the specific and the universal, sitting happily alongside each other in one character. He is somehow both a specific guy, and also every poor soul at every awful date that ever occurred.