Board of Directors
Chris Mock, President
Chris Mock grew up in upstate New York. He graduated in 1970 from the University of Detroit along with his wife, Susan. They married the week after graduation and moved to Los Angeles where he graduated from Cal State L.A. with a degree in clinical psychology. They relocated to Syracuse, New York where Chris worked for Catholic Social Services and for The Elmcrest Children’s Center. In 1978 he and Susan taught at the Syracuse Institute for Enabling Education, an alternative elementary school. They moved in 1979 to Southern New Jersey where he worked with chronic schizophrenics at Family Services of Atlantic County and later returned to teaching for ten years at the Atlantic County New School, another parent-run alternative K-8 school. Chris co-wrote with Susan and directed twenty school plays based on classic children’s literature as well as works of Shakespeare. He was next employed as an technology instructor at Estell Manor public school and later at Northfield Middle School in Northfield, New Jersey where he created and taught an applied technology program. Chris and Susan retired to Ashland in 2011. They discovered ANPF in the fall of 2011 and have been readers and reading team leaders since 2014.
Marie-Claire Erdynast, Vice President
Marie-Claire Erdynast (she/her) is the Associate Artistic Director at San Francisco Playhouse as well as a freelance dramaturg, director, puppeteer, and movement-based performer. She is particularly interested in developing and uplifting bold and innovative theatre. She is very proud to have developed and produced plays like Cashed Out by Claude Jackson Jr. and My Home on the Moon by Minna Lee at San Francisco Playhouse and to have directed and self-produced Red Bike by Caridad Svich at Santa Clarita Shakespeare Festival.
Bill Saltzstein, Treasurer
Bill introduced himself to his future wife Rae off stage at a community theater rehearsal when he, as Harpo, walked up to her, hung his leg on her arm and honked. While it wasn’t necessarily love at first sight, it was the start of something wonderful that included three decades of trips to Ashland for OSF productions, and grew to include ANPF as well.
Bill is an electrical engineer, currently principal of Code Blue Communications, providing wireless medical device consulting services. His corporate career started with the calculator group of Hewlett-Packard in Corvallis, and he left the corporate world as Director of Advanced Development for the Physio-Control division of Medtronic in Redmond, WA.
He has been a rabid theater fan since his childhood in the audience of the Milwaukee Rep, played both on and off stage in community theater, and has served on boards for Gallery Players of Oregon (McMinnville) and New Century Theater Company (Seattle).
After splitting time between Seattle and Ashland for nearly 10 years, Bill and Rae are now full time Ashland residents and are proud supporters of ANPF.
Barbara Ricketts, Secretary
Barbara’s first date with her future husband was in 1981, when he took her to
the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. After seeing Wild Oats, directed by Jerry
Turner, she was hooked. Barbara and Dennis have attended every OSF season
together since 1981.
After moving from the Central California Coast to Colorado to Massachusetts
and back to Southern California, they purchased a home in Ashland, where
they have lived full-time since 2012. They became familiar with ANPF in 2013
and began attending the Fall Festival each year, eventually becoming
volunteers: Barbara as a Co-Volunteer Coordinator in 2016 and Dennis
becoming House Manager.
Barbara has a BA in speech pathology and audiology from Pacific Union
College and did graduate work in speech communication and communicative
disorders at California State University, Fresno. She began her professional
career as a speech pathologist in Fresno in 1974 and she continued her career
in Santa Maria, California in private practice.
In 1987, after moving to Colorado, she worked with deaf and hard-of-hearing
people when she co-designed, implemented and became the director of the
National Hearing Aid Bank, a program of HEAR NOW, for people who could
not afford hearing aids at retail cost.
Barbara moved to Massachusetts in 1997 and began her last professional
adventure, when she started her own company, LifeStyle Management
Associates, L.L.C. as a professional organizer, working with people in their
homes and offices to clear clutter and create organizational systems. She
became a Certified Professional Organizer (CPO®) in 2007 and was an active
member of the National Association of Professional Organizers until retiring in
2016 after 23+ years of organizing people.
Miriam Laube
Miriam A. Laube is a mixed race, first generation American actor, producer, and director. She recently directed The Tempest for Santa Cruz Shakespeare. For 16 seasons at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Miriam was an actor and producer, where she had the honor of working with an extraordinary company of artists. Her favorite roles include Cleopatra, Olivia, Hermione, Rosalind and Julia, The Witch in Into the Woods and Vasantasena in The Clay Cart. She is proud to have originated the roles of Gynecia in Head Over Heels, Maruca in Party People, and Cleo in Family Album. Additionally at OSF, she served as the Associate Director on productions of Oklahoma and Pirates of Penzance. She also served as a Development Consultant at OSF, curating and hosting a bi-weekly interview series. She has worked on Broadway in Bombay Dreams and regionally at Berkeley Rep, Dallas Theater Center, Milwaukee Rep, Baltimore Center Stage, and The Guthrie Theater. She received a Henry Award for Best Supporting Actress for her work in the original production of The Book of Will at the Denver Center. Miriam is honored to be both a Fox Fellow and a Lunt-Fontanne Fellow.
She believes that theater at its best celebrates the human spirit, by creating workplaces and works of art that invite a diversity of voices into the story telling and the story making. This allows a space where one can examine the conflicts of the national dialogue through metaphor, gifting us the ability to hear with fresh ears and see with new eyes points of view and stories that are not our own and that , through the tools of the theater, can reveal or startle or wonder us into a deeper connection to our collective humanity, allowing us to exclaim, “I recognize you in me!”
Jeanine Salter
Jeanine Salter has been a reader for ANPF for six years. She has a BFA in professional acting from the University of Illinois and has performed in and around Chicago and Sacramento in small theaters.
Jeanine was lucky to be a part of a regional theater as it was forming in Leavenworth, Washington: Leavenworth Summer Theater. It was there, over 14 years of involvement, she developed her directing skills as well as performed in many of their plays. She has also been active in the Icicle Creek Play Reading Festival and The Icicle Times Radio Hour as a performer.
Having grown up in the culturally-rich north suburbs of Chicago, she was able to recognize the fervent cultural offerings in Ashland and chose to make her home in the Rogue Valley with her husband. Oregon Cabaret Theatre is where she found her footing over the last eight years, working as property mistress for three of those years and the box office for all eight.
She believes in the mission of nurturing new plays and looks forward to supporting ANPF how she can.
David Katz
David is a pharmaceutical R&D executive, currently Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Sparrow Pharmaceuticals, a private company that aims to spare patients the ravages of steroids. Previously, he held leadership positions in clinical drug development, drug discovery, and personalized medicine at Abbott/AbbVie.
David has been an ANPF reader for several years and is a current reading group leader. From 2006 to 2018, David was on the Board of Directors of American Theater Company in Chicago, serving at various times as President, Treasurer, and Acting Managing Director. ATC produced numerous new works, including the world premieres of Ayad Akhtar’s Disgraced (Pulitzer Prize for Drama) and Stephen Karam’s The Humans (4 Tony Awards, including Best Play), and commission of Beth Kander’s Over the Moon. He and his wife Lee were introduced to ANPF by Beth, who suggested that they attend after they moved to Portland in 2018. While he grew up as a regular audience member of The Old Globe in San Diego, David became hooked on live theater when he saw James Earl Jones in the premiere of August Wilson’s Fences at Yale Rep.