Ms. Beeson knows horror with humor

The newspaper’s theme for the end of October is horror, and drama teacher Ms. Sheena Beeson knows a little about the topic. As a teacher she has not done a whole lot of thriller or horror theatre, but “I have seen a few plays, and acted in a couple murder mysteries.” Her theatre group has organized murder mysteries in the school theatre, but have added comedic flavor. She said that the challenges that go with it are “working out the props and effects when people are murdered.”

Starting as a substitute and then as a student teacher, Ms. Beeson has been teaching at Armijo for seven years and now serves as the theater and drama teacher. She started showing interest in the arts when her mother put her in a ballet class when she was three years old and was “…truly living my best life” when it came for her recitals, she said. Furthermore, she “…studied dance, singing, and primarily musical theatre until high school.”

Ms. Beeson took theatre classes over the years and worked on plays outside of school as well. She obtained a bachelor’s degree in theatre arts and said that she “enjoys all parts of theatre: learning, teaching, doing, probably now more than ever, since I get to share it with so many awesome students.”

There was one memorial spooky and comedic murder mystery that she helped produce at Armijo: “I remember [it] specifically,” she said. “[It] required us to kill everyone with arrows to the chest. So we had to build small harnesses for everyone to wear under their costumes. Then we would turn all the lights off quickly when they were murdered and the actors would attached arrow props (that were strategically placed around the stage or handed to them by a stagehand) to the harness on their chest and then lay in a ‘dead’ position on the stage. That one was a lot of fun.”