This summer of ‘26, Ozark Actors Theatre kicks off their summer season with a highly-anticipated spooky line-up featuring “The Adams Family,” “Young Frankenstein,” and a new adaptation of “Dracula,” which Rolla High School’s own Mrs. Pitts was commissioned to write. Pitts is an English teacher at RHS and also a board member at OAT.
“So usually OAT does, of course, three shows every summer, professional shows, and they are kind of back-to-back, with maybe just a couple weeks in between. But for the third play, Dracula, we’re saving it for October. It’s never been done that way before. But specifically, because it’s Dracula, they want to make it into more of a Halloween-type show. It is October 8 through 25 of 2026,” Pitts said.
Although Pitts is active in the high school theatre program, helping with productions and even directing a few, she has never written a play before.
“I’ve written short stories, and I do a lot of memoir-style writing about my earlier life, but this is a completely different experience. And the way I’m doing it, I’ll have the novel up in front of me, and I’m going through and I’m writing, and I’m using some of the same language because it’s not copyright. I can use some of the same things, but then also try to fix the language a little bit so that it’s more easily understood … I’ve read plays with my students before, so I kind of knew the formatting, and Mrs. McNeven [RHS theater teacher and director] gave me some playwriting books to look at, and I’m just winging it,” Pitts said.
After struggling with finding someone to write a version of Dracula for them, OAT decided to ask Pitts.
“So it is more of a commission, but it also came almost through necessity. I’m on the OAT board and the artistic director, Blane Pressler, wanted to have a Dracula play, but he wanted it to be like an Ozark Actors Theater one, commissioned by OAT, contracted by OAT, like it’s ours. And we had a few people in mind. We even had a couple people that agreed to do it, but then other things came up. They never signed contracts. It just kept falling through. A couple times I was joking with him, just on the phone, like, ‘We could write this.’ And then the more I thought, I was like, ‘No, Blane, really, I can write this. With you obviously giving me notes and stuff, I can write this.’ I have a master’s in English, I know the story of Dracula, I’ve read the book Dracula…And so I wrote a couple of scenes, and over the summer we met, he read them. He loved them,” Pitts said.
This adaptation of the classic story of Dracula is written specifically for use at OAT and isn’t going to be published for commercial use.
“It is going to be primarily contracted through Ozark Actors Theater. We haven’t completely filled out contracts or done anything like that yet, but there is a possibility I could put in the contract that our high school is able to use this if they want to do some sort of dark, twisty Halloween play,” Pitts said.
Dracula is an old story without any copyright rules and is frequently adapted and changed for theatres, books, and even movies.
“I’ve seen a ton of Dracula adaptations, and both the creative director of OAT and I, we want it simple, like, ‘let’s take it back to the roots.’ There are already adaptations out there where you have the feminism twist and all different sorts of modern twists. And you have all those, and they’re all great. But we really just wanted to take it back to the bare bones. It is a spooky story. It is a scary story, it’s not a simple story, but it is just a simple, scary story, and that’s what we want it to be. So no real twist,” Pitts said.
Even with the desire to stay true to the classic story of Dracula, Pitts will obviously add her own artistic touches to make this play her own—and OAT’s own.
“I am trying to play up the relationship more between Lucy and Mina and make that more of a highlight. And Mina is a main character; she should give main character energy. And I feel like, in a lot of the adaptations, Lucy kind of outshines Mina, and I don’t want that in my adaptation. That’s really hard. Probably one of my biggest struggles with it right now is letting Mina shine through even more so than Lucy. It’s a struggle. I keep rewriting and revising those scenes specifically because of that,” Pitts said.
Playwriting is very different from traditional storywriting; it is mostly dialogue without much descriptive movement for the actors, leaving it up to the directors, but a play still has to tell a cohesive and understandable story.
“I think it’s a good experience, and then we’re already in the talks of writing a second one for another story. I won’t get to it because that’s in the vault right now. But I’m like, ‘Oh, this is kind of a full-time job.’ If I could just write full-time and get paid to do so, and if it’d be a livable wage, I feel like it’s something that I do enjoy doing, and I would love to do it. It’s kind of like a little side gig right now, on top of being a teacher and a mom,” Pitts said.
