Isaac was born in Utah, the oldest of seven children, and grew up all over the country. He pursued acting as a teenager, with an interesting variety of roles, and even getting a chance to direct his fellow students. In college, he became involved with Experiencing Shakespeare, an educational film for the Folger Library, which explored the first scene of King Lear while analyzing and performing it. Not only did Isaac have the incredible experience of studying Shakespeare with Dr. Arthur Henry King, one of the world’s leading Shakespeare Scholars, but he was also introduced to the idea that theatre was about being aware of and responding to other people. This idea had a profound impact on him and was one of the leading reasons he shifted from acting to directing.

While an undergraduate, he pursued this idea, exploring how relationships formed in an ensemble over time affect the relationships between actors and audience in performance. He formed a small ensemble and worked with them over the course of a semester, concentrating on using theatre exercises (many of which he invented) to develop their relationship. In a second semester he led the ensemble in staging an adaptation of The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. This production, which follows a group of ghosts on a bus trip from Hell to Heaven, was highly interactive, with the audience joining the cast in the line for the bus in hell, then going on a bus trip (a hydraulic lift) complete with a gun fight, before finally taking their seats in “Heaven”. He received the Outstanding Directing Student Award for this production, which sold out for all performances.

Isaac earned an MFA in directing from Columbia University where he studied with Anne Bogart, the Artistic Director of the SITI Co., and Robert Woodruff, now artistic director of American Repertory Theatre. In addition to his training as a director, Isaac was particularly excited about training in the Viewpoints. This gave him a vocabulary and a more developed way of working with the ideas he had begun to explore earlier. His time at Columbia also continued to increase his interest in ensembles. For an internship, he served as the assistant director to Bill Rauch on Cornerstone Theater’s award winning Broken Hearts: A BH Mystery by Lisa Loomer. For his thesis project, Isaac staged Barabbas by Michel de Ghelderode in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the largest gothic cathedral in the country.

While teaching at Utah Valley State College, Isaac formed Mountain Top Theatre with a group of students and his wife Shannyn Walters, his chief collaborator in life and in art. Mountain Top is a theatre ensemble dedicated to discovering new theatrical forms. Together, Mountain Top created the original works Images of the Soul (presented at the Hsi Lai Buddhist Temple in LA) and The Space Between. Mountain Top Theatre is currently a member of the Network of Ensemble Theater’s, an organization dedicated to “preserving and passing on the legacy of the ensemble theater movement”.

Since 2001, Isaac has worked at IU South Bend as an assistant professor, teaching directing, movement, and other performance classes. He directed over ten productions for them including The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, Deathwatch by Genet, Hayfever by Noel Coward, The Rainmaker by N. Richard Nash, and The Imaginary Invalid by Moliere. During the 2004-05 year, he led a group of students in researching the history of a local rubber plant and then creating the stage play Not a Trust: The Story of Ball Band and its People.

For the Oklahoma Shakespearean Festival, Isaac directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, setting it in China and drawing on many elements of Chinese Opera for the staging.