By Samuel Long
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH — When L.E. McCullough watched the WQED-TV documentary about the Hill District’s Freedom House Ambulance Service, he wondered what could further bring the fragment of Pittsburgh history to life.
As a playwright, crafting it for the theater was the logical next step.
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“You can use theater to get across so many different perspectives on history and make the audience think: ‘How is this history we’re hearing from the past connected to what we’re experiencing today?’,” McCullough said.
So he got to work, dramatizing the 1967 creation of the United States’ first mobile emergency medical unit staffed by professionally trained paramedics.
After running as a staged reading in May 2025, " Freedom House: Giving Life a Second Chance” returns as a fully produced play opening at the North Side’s New Hazlett Theater on Saturday at 7:30 p.m. Prime Stage Theatre will hold a preview of the show on Friday at the same time.
It stars Pittsburgh actor Willa “Katy” Cotten alongside Cynthia Dallas, Justin Mohr and Darrin Mosley.
“Freedom House” links today’s public health issues with what Pittsburgh, and the country, was experiencing 60 years ago. The ambulance service was created to respond to the healthcare needs of the city’s African American community, which often couldn’t rely on police and fire departments during an emergency.
In addition to saving the lives of Black Pittsburgh residents and training Black emergency medical workers, the service was the first of its kind and became a model for emergency medical services around the country.
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Prior to Freedom House, ambulance services were provided by the police or local funeral homes. These responders were not trained to provide care and did not keep medical equipment in their vehicles. Calls for emergency transportation from Black residents of Pittsburgh were sometimes unanswered or pickups were delayed.
“At the start, to make it come together, it had to be a mass collaboration of everybody involved, everybody really had to pull together and make it happen,” McCullough said.
Phil Hallen, a former ambulance driver who headed the Maurice Falk Medical Fund, conjured the idea for Freedom House back in the 1960s. Dr. Peter Safar, an anesthesiologist and distinguished professor of resuscitation medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and another physician, Dr. Nancy Caroline, trained 50 men and women to perform emergency medical services.
Though the service was able to significantly reduce the number of city casualties in its first two years, its workers often experienced racism from hospital personnel and from the public. Freedom House lasted until 1975 when Mayor Pete Flaherty replaced it with a city service.
Individuals who were involved in or related to the original Freedom House Ambulance Service will be attending opening night, including emergency professor and physician Dr. Rickquel Tripp and Beatrice Charles, the wife of Ed Charles, a founder of Freedom House Enterprises.
For director Scott Calhoon, " Freedom House: Giving Life a Second Chance” is an opportunity to tell the service’s story, which is “often overlooked.”
The New Hazlett Theater set, designed by Richard Morris of Cleveland, is made to immerse viewers in a late 1960s Hill District, which was a hub of jazz at the time.
“What better way to do that than to set the plan in a jazz club,” Calhoon said.
The seven-person cast acts out scenes using the chairs and props included in the set. Though the play isn’t a musical, music and singing are used to further evoke the show’s time and place.
“Having only seven actors represent all these different people in these locations that we are literally creating with chairs gives us a way of using our imagination and letting the audience use their imagination to put themselves in these places,” Calhoon explained.
It’s quite impactful to Calhoon that the first ambulance service was created right in Pittsburgh, a place the 62-year-old has lived since 1986. Despite this, many locals, including himself before being asked to work on the Prime Stage play, don’t know about the piece of history.
“I hope that the people involved receive recognition for what they did and what they accomplished,” he said. “It’s still used as the basis today on how to train people to do what they did.”
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