It is opening night, the house is open, and the set is not even finished. The director is exasperated. His stage manager informs him that the set was not finished because they “ran out of money.” “You finally get used to one way of doing things and they up and change all of the rules on you,” he exclaims. His writer, who is pacing the stage with loud nervous high-heeled clicks, turns on him. “There are no rules in art!” she shrieks, sounding half-insulted and half-horrified. The two are interrupted by their stage manager, who is trying to delicately remove them from the stage so that their play can commence. “There shouldn’t be,” she says, “but those days are past.” She shoos them off stage, the house lights dim, and the play within the play Gun Shy is finally allowed to begin. Gun Shy is a comedy written and directed by Joey Chavez, and performed by high school theater students at the Santa Fe charter school New Mexico School for the Arts. The play breaks the third wall and brings up questions about what constitutes art, and what is or isn’t allowable in art, over and over again. The answers to these questions, however, are perhaps more apparent in the people behind the play than the script itself. Before their performance, the cast paced, stretched, and applied last minute make-up or costume touch-ups while practicing a few last line-throughs—reciting their lines in order without blocking or acting through the entire play. Their director and teacher Joey Chavez entered the room intermittently and watched them intently, without interrupting the focus coursing through his students. Cris Lannucci, an NMSA senior who plays the author of the play within the play, is eager to sit for an interview,...