3 Questions

Santa Fe's Adrienne Rugg is a senior at New Mexico School for the Arts, and this Friday, Dec. 6 and Saturday, Dec. 7 at 7 pm, she's playing the lead in the school's performance of Variations at Warehouse 21. Written by playwright Katie Hims, Variations follows 13-year-old Alice as she navigates family, friends and growing up in seven parallel universes. We reached out to see what that's like.

You spent three years at NMSA's first home in the St. Francis Cathedral School on Alameda. What has your transition to the new campus been like?

The old campus was really cozy because it was a lot smaller and all of the departments were mushed together. There weren't special rehearsal spaces for music, theater and art so we would all be doing everything together in the hallways and it made us feel really connected to each other. At the new campus, there is so much more room so our sense of community went away for a little while but we've been working to get that sense of family back and connecting like we used to.

What do you like about Variations and how has the rehearsal process been for you?

The play is really interesting because it's set in seven different universes and since I'm playing Alice I get to experience all of them. They're all centered around one family but in each universe the family members are different. They all have this kind of connectedness, energy and sameness that links them together so it's been great getting to explore the similarities and differences of the universes and the family dynamics within them. Initially we didn't know if we would get the rights to perform Variations because it's such a new play and has only been performed once before, but when we did we were absolutely ecstatic. And we get to do British accents!

Your character in the play is a 13-year-old girl living at home. Do you relate to her at all?

In the play Alice has had this big fight with her mom, she's upset with her family life and she wishes that everything would be different. When I was younger, I could relate to that more but now that I'm older I'm not as wild as Alice. She does have a lot of universal feelings though. There will always be points in time when we are frustrated and especially as a young teenager, that can be very emotional.