Mr. Fish (who turns out to be quite genial and soft-spoken in conversation) grew up in suburban Tenafly, N.J., the son of a lawyer mother and an accountant father, who also owned a summer camp. Asked to describe what kind of a kid he was, he laughed and said, “Oh, you know, weird, awkward, shy.”
His parents often took him to the city to see Broadway shows, but also work by Andrei Serban and Peter Brook. (Mary Testa, who plays Aunt Eller in “Oklahoma!,” recalled one of Mr. Fish’s quips: “I’m half La MaMa, half ‘La Cage,’ ” as in “Aux Folles.”)
At Northwestern, he thought he would major in theater, but gravitated instead to the more experimental and theoretical Performance Studies department, where he credits teachers like Lee Roloff, a Jungian analyst and poetry scholar, for fostering his intensely language-focused approach to theater.
Not that Mr. Fish has always made the words easy to hear. As an undergraduate, he directed a roving production of “Our Town” whose first act took place in the football stadium, where the actors screamed the opening from the 50-yard line — the audience was in the top three rows of the stadium — before running the length of the field.
Mr. Fish’s own career might be summed up as running all over the field in wildly unpredictable maneuvers, none of which seemed to be heading toward a commercial score.
After college, he worked for four years as an assistant to Michael Kahn, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington. By the early 2000s, he had made a name for himself doing what he called “pretty aggressively modern” stagings of Shakespeare, Molière and other classics at American regional theaters, but increasingly found that his work and the audience were parting ways.
