On the stereotypical spectrum of high-school cliques, the jocks would be at one end, and the theater kids would be on the very opposite other side. 

Obviously this binary framework is reductive, but it speaks to the perceived polarity between sports and theater. While plays about sports come around every so often, only a handful of shows in my theatergoing career have focused primarily on drawing connections — dramatic, aesthetic, and thematic — between sports and the stage. 

And two of them were this season.  

One Song at NYU Skirball, and Burnout Paradise at St. Ann’s Warehouse — like Monica Bill Barnes’ One Night Only (running as long as we can) before them — put into conversation the conventions of live theater and the conventions of sporting events, tasking their casts with completing athletic goals to represent the labor of live art and the artist’s life.

And the fact that the three productions last only 75-minutes seems relevant, given how all of them revolve around the exhaustion of performers.