Oh, and the audience were all dressed as chickens.

“My favorite memory of Daniel is him giving intense notes to his assistant while they were both dressed in chicken suits,” recalled JoAnne Akalaitis, a close friend and mentor who ran the Bard theater program at the time.

Mr. Fish clarified that they were actually “chicken ponchos,” before turning serious.

“I have a fascination with a kind of anarchy onstage,” he said. “I think I very rarely hit it, but the work that really, really excites me has that quality to it.”

It was at Bard that “Oklahoma!,” which involves the audience in a somewhat more restrained way, also took shape. In 2007, Ms. Akalaitis asked Mr. Fish if he had an idea for a show, and he threw out the Rodgers & Hammerstein classic, which he remembered fondly from childhood but suggested mainly, he likes to say, because no one else would ever have let him do it.

He started with little more than the concept of “dinner theater” and the idea of the audience sitting down for an actual meal cooked onstage.

“I didn’t really have much of an idea beyond that,” he said. He added: “I’m most interested in work where there’s real transaction going on between the stage and the audience. That’s the thing that really turns me on.”

The student “Oklahoma!” became something of a legend among those who had seen it, including Mr. Lester, who in 2015 asked him to stage it again at Bard’s SummerScape Festival, with professional actors. (Mr. Fish also wanted live chickens; Mr. Lester said no. “Daniel can be very emphatic,” he recalled, with a chuckle. “We had words.”)

That production generated tremendous buzz in theater circles, and a long period of competitive scrapping over its future that might be compared to the tense auction of picnic hampers at the box social in the show’s second act.