Boston Playwrights’ Theatre Continues 2024-2025 Season With Spring Rep Festival

Boston Playwrights’ Theatre (BPT) will continue its 2024-25 season with its Spring Rep Festival, running February 20 through March 9.

The Spring Rep Festival features The Fig Tree, and The Phoenix, and The Desire to Be Reborn by Isabelle Fereshteh Sanatdar Stevens (directed by Nikta Sabouri) and The Recursion of a Moth by Brandon Zang (directed by KATIE BROOK), two plays about the power of love to transcend the boundaries of sequential time. 

“This season’s playwrights are the first to go through the program with BU Head of MFA Playwriting Nathan Alan Davis, and are poised to become important new voices in the American theater,” BPT Artistic Director Megan Sandberg-Zakian said. “Presenting their work in this festive format emphasizes our desire to celebrate them and their timely, challenging, beautiful work.”  

Fig Tree follows a blossoming friendship between two eight-year-olds in 1980’s Iran, while Moth is a sci-fi time travel love story that literally goes to the moon and back. The two writers are interested in concepts of home and family, and how those concepts transform for peoples displaced from their homelands due to war or other trauma. 

Sanatdar Stevens and Zang—members of the class of 2025—are in their final year of study in Boston University’s M.F.A. in Playwriting Program.

Sanatdar Stevens’ play Kimia Zaman and the Whispers of the Mountains was the 2024 recipient of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival’s John Cauble Award for Outstanding Short Play. In November, they were announced as the new Associate Artistic Director of New York Stage and Film.

Zang was honored with the 2023 Herman Voaden Prize, presented biennially by Queen’s University, for his play Ah Wing and the Automaton Eagle. He made his professional Boston debut in May with Nüwa in Fairyland, produced by CHUANG Stage.

BPT’s current season is centered on two “reps”—fall and spring mini-festivals featuring pairs of new plays written by BU’s MFA in Playwriting Program class of 2025—to offer audiences the opportunity to see two plays in conversation with each other and the chance to witness these new voices as they launch their professional writing careers. 

Fig Tree and Moth also share key personnel in their scenic, lighting and properties designers. 

“It is so delightful to see BPT’s intimate Snodgrass Stage transformed from a stark moonscape to an Iranian orchard, all through the elegant and technically simple work of our shared design team,” said Sandberg-Zakian, “One of the pleasures of working in rep is seeing how much is possible with the magic of theater. Audience members who see both shows will get the full effect of the transformation!”

Fig Tree features Minou Pourshariati as Mandana and Danny Bryck* as Javeed. The creative team includes Scenic Designer Cleo Brooks, Costume Designer Jez Insalaco, Lighting Designer Grant Powicki, Sound Designer Arshan Gailus, Properties Designer Courtney Licata, Production Stage Manager Jenna Worden* and Production Assistant Gabby Franklin. 

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