All the world’s a stage, but American stages aren’t always so worldly. “If [plays] are foreign, they’re maybe British or Irish—and they present Molière once in a while,” says Guy Ben-Aharon, 23. “Imagine how much more we’d understand what’s going on in Syria if we saw Syrian plays. They wouldn’t be just an image on CNN.”

It’s in that spirit that he founded Israeli Stage, German Stage, Swiss Stage and (whew!) the forthcoming French Stage. He started with scripts from his native Israel, organizing his first staged reading in 2010 as an Emerson undergrad. Israeli Stage has since presented 14 plays by nine scribes, fostering dialogue with post-show talkbacks, tours to college campuses (15 and counting) and diverse programming, with “narratives about Israeli Arabs, the Orthodox community in Israel, the Sephardic community in Israel,” Ben-Aharon says. “If it has strong emotional life, and it’s culturally specific but universally themed, it’ll be on our stages.”

One rapt audience member was Goethe-Institut director Detlef Gericke-Schönhagen. After seeing The Banality of Love, about the philosophers Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, he tapped Ben-Aharon to create a similar program for the Goethe-Institut. Guten tag, German Stage. Swissnex Boston followed suit, and now Ben-Aharon is working with the French Cultural Center on French Stage.

He’s not stopping there. Next year will see Israeli Stage’s first full-scale productions. And this month marks its most ambitious program yet: a two-week residency with Israeli playwright Savyon Liebrecht, who’ll give lectures and workshop two plays, Freud’s Women and Dear Sigmund and Carl, with free world premiere readings staged at Babson, Brandeis and BU. Ben-Aharon relishes the chance to bring such works to students—and cultivate a new generation of theater buffs. “I go to the theater, and I’m often the youngest person,” he says. “It’s selfish. I want to work in theater for the next 50 years.”