BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Silverthorne is a registered 501 (c)(3) non-profit arts organization. If you are interested in supporting our work by becoming a member of the Board of Directors, please contact us via email to find out more about our work.
Ezekiel Baskin is a freelance director, lighting designer, stage & production manager, and arts educator. They have stage managed three productions for Silverthorne: Bright Half Life, The Revolutionists, and Stupid Fucking Bird; and were delighted when they were invited to join the board in October 2021 to help Silverthorne chart a course for the future.
Directing credits include Plague Wedding (Theater Between Addresses), Grail Knight (Electric Lite Collective), Night Train (Electric Lite Collective), Queer Intimacies (Eggtooth Productions), Mr Burns: A Post-Electric Play (Hampshire College), and Caeneus (HC). Stage management and design credits include the world premiere of NOW (Pauline Productions), A Little Night Music (Greater Worcester Opera), Athena (Real Live Theatre), The *Annotated* Taming (Hampshire Shakespeare Company), The Life and Death of Queen Margaret (RLT) and The Final Say (Strident Theater).
Ezekiel is connected with a number of other Valley theatre organizations, serving on the Board of Directors for Valley Light Opera, and as a proud Governing Member of Real Live Theatre. They are a Founding Member of Theater Between Addresses, a collective of theatre artists & writers focused on fostering and creating new work, and serve as Resident Lighting Designer for Pauline Productions. Ezekiel holds a B.A. from Hampshire College in Theatre, Education & Psychoanalytic Studies, with a focus on facilitating collaborative spaces. Beyond the stage, Ezekiel works in public health, currently serving as a Public Health Accompaniment Specialist with Partners in Health.
Sam Samuels is an actor and director who first appeared onstage in the Pioneer Valley in 1978 and has been in many performances since. At Silverthorne he’s appeared in The Mystery of Irma Vep and Tar2f!. He’s also acted in productions at UMass Amherst, New Century Theatre, Panopera, Happier Valley Comedy, and Mt. Holyoke College Summer Theatre. Sam has directed operas for Panopera and for the Smith College music department.
He holds a degree in English from Harvard and an MFA in acting from NYU Tisch School for the Arts and completed coursework in the nonfiction writing program at The University of Iowa. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Sierra, and Smithsonian Magazine, among many others. He is Director of Gift Planning for Smith College. Sam is a proud member of Actors Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, and the American Guild of Musical Artists. He was a contestant on Jeopardy! He came in second. The attorney came in third.
His dramatic writing projects focus on rebels and outsiders in local history. These include the opera librettos The Scarlet Professor and The Garden of Martyrs, both with composer Eric Sawyer, as well as the screwball comedy Nobody’s Girl, which debuted at the Northampton Academy of Music. His cabaret musical, My Evil Twin, in collaboration with Sawyer, has toured Fringe festivals in the U.S. and Canada.
Erdman has taught in Scotland, El Salvador and Sri Lanka – in the latter country, as part of a Fulbright Fellowship. He is a professor in the UMass Theater Department, and a recipient of the Outstanding Teacher Award from the UMass College of Humanities and Fine Arts.
Gina Kaufmann is a director and teacher who moved to the Pioneer Valley in 2017 to join the Department of Theater faculty at UMass Amherst, where she is a professor of Acting and Directing. Her first (and very joyful) experience with Silverthorne Theater was directing Lauren Gunderson’s feminist comedy, The Revolutionists, in 2019.
Gina is a member of the Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC). She has worked as a director and acting coach in numerous regional venues, including Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, The Williamstown Theatre Festival, Lake Tahoe Shakespeare Festival and Sacramento Theatre Company. In New York, she directed for SoHo Rep, HOME for Contemporary Theatre and Art, Wings Theatre, and Dixon Place.
David Rowland retired in 2013 after 47 years of teaching, the last 35 as director of the Theatre Program at Northfield Mount Hermon School where he taught Acting, Directing, and other theater courses, and directed over 100 major productions. Shortly after his retirement, Rowland and Lucinda Kidder began talking about starting a professional theater company in Franklin County.
Silverthorne Theater Company, named after the principal performing space on NMH’s old Northfield campus, was officially founded in 2014, celebrating that first year with productions of Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy (directed by Kidder) and Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle (directed by Rowland) in NMH’s Chile’s Theater.
Following two years at GCC’s Sloan Theater, Silverthorne moved in 2017 to its present home on the fourth floor of Hawks & Reed Performing Arts Center in downtown Greenfield. Rowland directed the first production in this new venue, the Long, Singer, and Winfield parody, The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare (abridged), with three actors offering comically twisted excerpts from the Bard’s collected works.
Rowland directed A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters as a benefit for Silverthorne in the LAVA Center, Greenfield, in February of 2020. After retiring from active membership on Silverthorne’s board of directors, Rowland consulted with the board to help chart Silverthorne’s course through and beyond the current pandemic.