 Hi, I'm Lauren Ganderstein, a playwright in residence at Marin Theater Company. I think having me involved in the company in this residency has impacted the company in kind of small and big ways through conversations primarily about feminism, having conversations with board members or audience members in a talk bag or students in one of my playwriting classes, having kind of a constant presence of a conversation about equality specifically in intersectional feminism means that I can make those connections really directly about a show that Marin is producing or one of my plays that I'm developing when asked you know why where did this play come from especially in playwriting classes both in kind of more in high school students and older students really connecting the dots about why a storyteller tells something a certain way and how that may affect how they see both plays at Marin and any storytelling whether it's TV or movies or anything so I've been really excited to make those connections and see somebody's mind kind of change about something even just with one a one sentence you know description of a way I describe a play versus a board member describing a play or something like that so that's something that I've been able to kind of track and very excited about that those conversations. I'm Jason Minodakis I'm the artistic director at Marin and I think one of the things that has changed about Lauren's writing or her work process probably more than her writing through the residency has been a few of her projects we've actually taken to doing a on a couple of month basis workshops with very specific actors and Lauren's always been a very collaborative writer where she's she's taken her drafts and she's brought them in and she's had table reads with folks and she takes response very well the way people respond to the play and the thoughts that they have and she incorporates them very quickly into our work now she's working a little bit differently on specific projects where she's actually working with the artists in a very different way not so much responding to feedback as seeking out impetus and seeking out initiating ideas and and working with the artist's feelings on original text and moving on to to creating a new story out of an original text plus the way an artist is reacting to it and then Lauren's taking that synthesis and writing from there and I think that's a whole new sort of thing um and we're doing a whole commission actually in that style which one of the four commissions that she's writing which is really kind of neat and it's evolved from just being actors to being actors and musicians and now songwriters as well so um it's sort of an evolving process for her and it's going to be interesting to see how an entire play of hers gets built from this very collaborative model so I think that's a new thing