Fish

Fish is a new play by Melis Aker, staged Off-Broadway at WP Theater on the Upper West Side. WP Theater presents it as a coming-of-age play with a dark comic streak. The story is set in London in 2016 and centers on Karya, a 17-year-old whose brother has vanished without explanation.

This is a world premiere and a limited engagement. WP Theater is the lead producer. Signature Theatre Company co-produces, New Light Theater Project is in association, and Noor Theatre is consulting producer. Signature commissioned the play and developed it. Fish is the first of the three new plays WP Theater has programmed for its 2026-27 season.

Aker wrote an original script; it is not adapted from a book or a film. Its subjects are grief, growing up as a girl, and an online game that gets out of hand.

Karya is a London teenager from a Turkish immigrant family. Her brother, Emir, has gone missing, and nobody knows what happened to him. He is discussed throughout the evening but never walks on stage. Her mother, Ceyda, believes he is alive and has been radicalized. It is a far-fetched idea, yet as time passes people around Karya begin to treat it as a real possibility.

Karya's best friend, Libby, urges her to test the theory online. Libby reasons that a social media handler for ISIS might know where Emir is. Together the two girls set up an experiment: Karya takes on a false identity and contacts ISIS members, hoping to learn something about her brother. Her first approach is a veiled photograph sent by direct message on Twitter.

The experiment is a form of catfishing, and it changes character when Karya discovers that she can talk these men into sending her money for a promised journey to Syria. Her motives turn mercenary, and the risks grow. Two other people sit close to her story: Isha, the ex-girlfriend of her missing brother, and Jon, her swimming instructor. Karya keeps going back for lessons, so swimming runs through the play alongside the online scheme.

Aker grew up in Turkey and now divides her time between London and New York. Besides plays she writes for the screen, acts and makes music. She earned an MFA at Columbia University and is finishing a doctorate in creative writing in London. Her earlier plays include Murmurs at Theatre503, Hundred Feet Tall, written with Benjamin Scheuer, at The Old Vic, Hound Dog at Ars Nova and PlayCo, and Indigo Dreams at Williamstown Theatre Festival. For Azul she received a Jonathan Larson Grant, and she has appeared on the Kilroys List.

The idea for Fish goes back to 2016, when Aker started gathering material from two news stories. In one, mothers watched ISIS videos looking for signs of sons who had disappeared. In the other, a group of Chechen women fooled online recruiters into paying for a trip to Syria that never took place, and the women were prosecuted afterward.

Aker has said she chose to approach terrorism, radicalization and the internet through one teenager's point of view, as Karya tries to make sense of the people closest to her and of her own grief. The themes she names are truth and safety online in 2016, and how people come to live with not knowing. The play runs in a single act with no intermission.

The set is built from tiles and shifts between a kitchen, a bathroom and a swimming pool. A trench at the front of the stage is used for the swimming scenes. The online conversations are not shown on screens. They are staged with sound, light and distorted voices, and every actor except the one playing Karya is also billed for the voices.

The cast has five actors. As of October 2026, Yasmin Ranz-Lind plays Karya, Alyssa May Gold plays Libby, Roxanna Hope Radja plays Ceyda, Sara Haider plays Isha and Kario Marcel plays Jon. Ranz-Lind makes her WP Theater and Signature debut. Gold has been on the WP Theater stage before, in the world premiere of Our Dear Dead Drug Lord. Radja has Broadway credits including Torch Song and Frost/Nixon. Haider comes from Karachi, Pakistan, where she is known as a singer and for her work on Coke Studio Pakistan, and she acts as well. Marcel, who also writes, comes from Aruba.

In September 2022, Signature Theatre named Aker its first LaunchPad Resident, a three-year residency for early-career playwrights. Fish was developed within that residency. Signature later announced a four-performance presentation of the play for September 2024 at its Pershing Square Signature Center.

The world premiere at WP Theater began previews on September 26, 2026, and the play opened on October 11, 2026. For Signature, it opens the 2026-27 season and is the only show that year staged outside the Pershing Square Signature Center.

The companies behind the production have long New York histories. Julia Miles started WP Theater in 1978 as the Women's Project, a program at the American Place Theatre, and in 1987 it became a company of its own. It describes itself as the oldest and largest US theater company devoted to work by women and gender-diverse artists, and it has won a Lucille Lortel Award (2018), an Obie Award (2019) and a Drama Desk Award (2020), each for its body of work. Signature was founded in 1991 by Jim Houghton, and in 2014 it became the first New York City company to receive the Regional Theatre Tony Award. Noor Theatre, an Obie-winning company founded in 2010, develops and produces work by Middle Eastern, Southwest Asian and North African artists.