Directed by Andrew Lazarow
Written by Anthony Darnell
Created by the Satori Group

Our stage is a table set for two, where the audience is also the star.

After last year’s sold-out, Producers’ Pick of the Fringe hit iLove: The Satori Group returns with (rsvp), an exploration of pedestrian performance in day-to-day humanity.

Participants wear headphones, which inform what you say and do, intimately combining reality and illusion until they are synonymous.

Inspired by Rotozaza’s Etiquette and loosely based on Ovid’s tale of Baucis and Philomen, (rsvp) is an experience beyond description, erasing the line between audience and performer. You may be reserved, but you’ll never have reservations again.

Praise for (rsvp)

“…it’s so fine-tuned to the kind of out there theatrical experimentation that ignites Fringe festivals that it might be the “fringiest” thing in this year’s Fringe.

You arrive. You are seated at one of the café tables. Your co-experiencer is seated facing you. There are some common items on the table: A carafe of water, two small glasses, a mug containing a rolled up piece of paper and some marking pens, a Polaroid instant camera.

The cafe’s head waiter, who just happens to be the director of RSVP, Satori member Andrew Lazarow, instructs you to put on one of the audio headsets laying on the table.

Soon you begin hearing one of a pair of coordinated sound tracks. One track has a man’s voice, the other a woman’s. But gender isn’t germane. It doesn’t matter which you hear.

Over the next 30 minutes you’ll be instructed to do and say a series of quite simple things: to pour water, to stand, to sit, to look about you and to look closely at your tablemate, to join hands, to ask and answer questions, to offer greetings, to read something from the paper on the table, to write something and present it to your partner. What’s expected of each participant is just what a literal translation of the phrase RSVP asks — that you free up and allow yourself to respond openly to the series of simple stimuli that the taped instructions set up.

What can happen to you is what Darnell says Satori intends to happen: Each pair of participants, oblivious to their surroundings, will achieve a moment of direct, intimate communication in a public place. What it all means is what it will mean to any individual who approaches it with open anticipation and a willingness to acquire a new sort of experience.

No two responses are ever likely to be the same. One thing it might mean is a realization of the large truth bound up in a small phrase spoken by one of the taped voices: “You have eternal life in this moment.”

- Tom McElfresh, City Beat

You are the play. And much to my surprise, it was fun. As with last year’s “iLove,” Satori has come up with another fringe hit.

-Joe McDonough, The Cincinnati Enquirer