The official statement from CityLit:
Page Hearn, a seventeen-year mainstay at Chicago's City Lit Theater, best known for his sublime portrayal of the perfect butler Jeeves in a series of P.G. Wodehouse adaptations, died of a heart attack Saturday, May 18, while crossing a street in Jersey City NJ, where he had moved in 2005. He was 48.
Hearn had a family history of heart disease—his grandmother had died from the same cause at the same age as he, and his father recently underwent bypass surgery—but he himself had not been diagnosed with heart trouble. He and his partner Steve Gutierrez had just that day completed moving to Brooklyn, and Hearn was running an errand in Jersey City related to the move when he collapsed while crossing an intersection on his way to catch a train. Doctors at the hospital where he was taken said he most likely died where he fell.
Hearn had moved out east to pursue more lucrative acting opportunities, and just this month had made his network television debut with a small speaking role as a jury foreman on an episode of NBC's Law and Order: Special Victims Unit that aired on May 6. Onstage in New York, he acted in shows at Metropolitan Playhouse in the East Village and the off-Broadway Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, as well as directed at Abingdon Theatre and wrote a short play that was produced by Metropolitan.
A Baltimore native, Hearn was born on December 2, 1959. He attended Northwestern University in the early 1980s before beginning a 22-year career in Chicago theatre. Over the years he worked as an actor at The Commons, Bailiwick, Lifeline, Oak Park Festival, Court, Raven, Buffalo Theatre Ensemble, About Face and Reflections theatres. He was part of the 1990 Jeff Citation-winning ensemble cast of City Lit's The Good Times Are Killing Me as well as a member of the 1999 After Dark Award-winning ensemble cast of Noises Off produced by Broutil and Frothingham at Theatre Building Chicago. He directed for New Tuners, The Free Associates, Arts/Lane, and Reflections. He founded Metamorphosis Theatre, for which he adapted and produced Descent into the Maelstrom, a one-man Edgar Allan Poe show he performed at various Chicago locations every Hallowe'en from 1987 through 2006. He wrote the children's plays Ooooogy Green and Other Fables (which toured Chicago area schools for thirteen years) and The Adventures of Jack Rabbit, Private Ear, and was the voice of Fidgel the scientist/penguin in the animated children’s series 3-2-1 Penguins!
By far most of his work in Chicago was at City Lit. From 1988 to 2005, he worked here as actor, director, understudy, playwright, adaptor, director of touring, tech director, managing director and de facto artistic director. As managing director, he shepherded the theatre through the transition from being an itinerant company to having the stability of its current permanent home in Edgewater. His acting at City Lit encompassed the sinister strangeness of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw and the pointed satire of the title role in Moliere's Tartuffe. As a director, he was drawn toward inventive stagings of classic comedies such as Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals, which he staged with a Keystone Kops motif. He wrote one full-length play for City Lit, An Ecstasy of Dragonflies, a romantic fantasy. For a time in the early years of this decade, when City Lit was going through bad financial times, he was the theatre's only staff member and kept the place open largely through the force of his will.
Over a fifteen-year period, he was involved in some capacity or other with every one of City Lit's signature P.G. Wodehouse stagings, highlighted by his work as the unflappable Jeeves (memorably paired with Mark Richard as world-class nincompoop Bertie Wooster) in the theatre's nine-year string of Bertie-and-Jeeves productions. His script for Jeeves and the Mating Season won a 2002 Jeff Citation for Outstanding Adaptation.
In addition to Gutierrez, Hearn is survived by his parents, Beau and Ellie Hearn (his step mother) and Brooke and Bill Pacy (his step father), his brothers, Biff Hearn and Gibson Hearn, his sister Dana Hark, and eight nieces and nephews.
A memorial service will be held at City Lit Theater, 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, on June 30 at 7:00 pm. Memorials to be held in New York City and Baltimore are also being planned.
