At Prime Stage Theatre’s Allegheny Cemetery Walk, Lawrence McCullough beckons visitors up a hill saying, “Please, come! There are seven residents, and they’re all loquacious!”
Actor Johnny Patalano waits dressed as aviation pioneer Calbraith Perry Rodgers, donning ace fighter-style goggles and a leather bomber jacket. Born in Shadyside in 1879, Rodgers became the first person to make a transcontinental flight across the United States. Despite engine explosions, crashes, and rough landings, Rodgers flew 4,000 miles and was greeted as hero by 50,000 people when he landed in Long Beach, Calif. in 1911. Tragically, he died five months later at age 33 — the first pilot to fatally crash from a bird strike — and was interred at Allegheny Cemetery.
“Isn’t it a great day for flying?” Rodgers (Patalano) asks, describing himself as one of the greatest aviators who ever lived. “You[’ve] never heard of me, have you? Seriously? Well, today, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to correct this critical knowledge gap.”
Departed Pittsburgh legends don’t typically speak from beyond the grave, at least not for timed tours. But at a Prime Stage Theatre fundraiser on June 21, local actors portrayed seven notable, and deceased, Pittsburghers at Allegheny Cemetery.
With a goal to “bring their history to life,” the ticketed event featured characters in full period dress performing monologues about their lives for 21st-century visitors. In many cases, including Rodgers’, the dead actually reside at Allegheny Cemetery, and actors regaled audiences while standing at their characters’ gravesites.
“The key to the whole event is to actually feel like you’re watching this person from the past come to life,” Prime Stage board member Sueanne Zoratto tells Pittsburgh City Paper. “Honestly, I think that is the intrigue.” While cemeteries often host walking tours, “just walking around looking at tombstones is different than actually seeing that person come to life and tell their own story,” she says.
Zoratto had the idea for a cemetery walking tour three years ago after seeing a similar event at Bluff City Cemetery outside Chicago. Prime Stage has held sold-out walks at Homewood Cemetery — where the theater will return on Sept. 27 — for two years running, but brought the tour to the 300-acre Allegheny Cemetery for the first time.
The move opened up a new cast of historical characters including the first “it girl,” Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, once at the center of a notorious “trial of the century”; steamboat captain Thomas Shields Clarke; iron and steel magnate Henry Oliver, who asked visitors to take care of the grand public pool that still bears his name; and philanthropist Kate Upshur Moorhead, a direct descendant of First Lady Martha Washington who married one of Pittsburgh’s earliest iron millionaires.
Zoratto explains that casting available actors sometimes meant adapting monologues for the wives of past bigwigs.
“It gives them a voice, too,” Zoratto tells City Paper. “And when you actually start investigating a lot of these women, they were amazing.”
Suzanne Ward, who played Delia Raymond Carr, says she jumped at the chance audition, though relatively little is known about her character, the wife of bank president William Carr.
“I love doing these [walks] because I learn more about Pittsburgh every time I open another one of these characters up,” Ward says. “It’s just a wonderful historical type of study.”
Ward searched online to learn more about Carr’s life and only turned up a family tree, but supplemented her monologue by visiting the family’s historic home in Point Breeze, and considering Carr’s time (1837-1911), when the country saw a typhoid epidemic, the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the Long Depression of the 1870s.
“Her story is interesting too, because she wanted to do all this philanthropy, but for whatever reason, after her husband died, it sounded like something ended up happening [and] she didn’t have the resources,” Ward says.
In a rueful monologue, Carr (Ward) lays out the couple’s vision for establishing Pittsburgh’s first public park before her husband’s sudden death on New Year’s Eve 1888. (Ultimately, Carr bequeathed land to the Mellon family that became Mellon Park.)
“Well, life will take us in many different directions,” Carr (Ward) concludes. “But if, at the end of that road, it takes you to a beautiful park, that is a journey well spent.”
Scripts were written by McCullough, Prime Stage’s public relations director and a playwright, and often struck a reflective tone, with characters contemplating their legacies after death, and even making literary allusions.
Evelyn Nesbit Thaw (Anne Rematt), the walk’s most famous figure, stood at the grave of her ex-husband and torturer, Henry Kendall Thaw. A Tarentum-born fashion model and chorus girl, in 1906, Nesbit became “the heroine at the center of the crime of the century,” she explains to visitors. Scandal gripped the nation when Pittsburgh’s Thaw, heir to a $40 million railroad fortune — who was “also, regrettably, quite insane,” Nesbit (Rematt) says — shot and killed architect Stanford White, who’d previously preyed on Nesbit, in front of 900 witnesses. “But no matter,” she adds.
Though she recalled the murder and media sensation, Nesbit (Rematt) ended by describing the legacy she tried to forge after Thaw, serving as an advisor to a movie about her, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (1955) starring Joan Collins.
“Did you know I wrote two memoirs? One of which you can find at Mr. Andrew Carnegie’s library in Oakland,” Nesbit tells the audience.
Prime Stage actors and staff say they hope that the cemetery walk sparks greater interest in Pittsburgh history. Prime Stage’s upcoming 29th season of “Strength, Voices and Hope” will spotlight local stories, including a play written by McCullough about Pittsburgh’s Freedom House Ambulance Service.
“We want to get people to learn about our history here, and then get them into a theater,” McCullough says.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2025.
