Kurt Ehrmann could make an impression onstage before he even opened his mouth. With his silver-fox shock of white hair and his watchful, expressive face, Ehrmann stood out, whether he was a lead or a supporting character. But for his friends in Chicago theater, he was so much more than a great actor. He was family.
Ehrmann, 58, died suddenly on Monday, August 10, from a heart attack. The unexpected news sent shock waves through a theater community that has seen a lot of loss in the past year, including the death of actor Ben Veatch last December and of director Lavina Jadhwani in September. He leaves behind his father, Chuck Ehrmann (his mother, Eileen, preceded him in death), his wife, Gianine DeFrancesco, and their cat, George.
But his expansive personality and deep curiosity about the lives of others created a larger family throughout Chicago theater. The creative and personal connections Ehrmann forged over three decades working on local stages are emblematic of the best ways that Chicago’s theater scene, as fraught as it can be, is also often a beautiful and irreplaceable foundation for love, community, and great performances.
Though Ehrmann had become known in recent years for his recurring roles on Chicago Fire and Chicago Justice as Deputy District Chief Joel Tiberg, who runs the training academy, his real love was working onstage. Ehrmann wasn’t a native of Chicago. He grew up in New Jersey and studied theater at New York University—DeFrancesco told me that the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler was one of his mentors.
“He had a lot of great teachers and I think that’s where he figured out it’s being an artist, but there is also the craft of it where you’re like, ‘OK, we gotta put this thing together,’” said DeFrancesco. “Everybody’s working in concert for this one goal and how do you do your part in the best way possible to serve the play? And he was always about serving the play, helping the person across from him get where they needed to go so they could both get there together, and having them help him.”
His decision to move to Chicago about 30 years ago was simple, DeFrancesco said: “He heard this is a great theater town and he fell in love with it.”
Kurt Ehrmann (center) as Ronald Reagan in Defiant Theatre’s 2000 production of Christopher Johnson’s Godbaby, flanked by Justin Fletcher as Jerry Falwell (L) and David Skvarla as Mikhael Gorbachev (R) Credit: Geoffrey Fingerhut
Chicago theaters fell in love with Ehrmann, too. His long list of credits included performances with Defiant Theatre, House Theatre of Chicago, and Apple Tree (all three are now defunct), as well as Lifeline, Steppenwolf, Court, and Chicago Shakespeare. But his performances with the Hypocrites gave him his greatest acclaim and a lifelong circle of friends and collaborators.
The Hypocrites, founded by director Sean Graney in 1997, became known for high-octane takes on classics. Ehrmann was with the company from the beginning (the Hypocrites stopped producing after 2018). Among his many memorable performances were as Dr. Dysart, the psychiatrist for a troubled young man in Peter Shaffer’s Equus in 2004; as the blind autocratic Hamm in Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (2015); and as the diabolical Roy Cohn in Angels in America (2006).
Playing oily or domineering figures seemed to come easy to Ehrmann, who also played Ronald Reagan in Defiant Theatre’s 2000 production of Christopher Johnson’s Godbaby and the, well, hypocritical JJ Peachum in the Hypocrites’ 2008 production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera. To me, Ehrmann was always the guy onstage who seemed caught between the urge to break into a laugh or a tirade, if only the right provocation presented itself.
Actor and fellow Hypocrites ensemble member Mechelle Moe told me that Ehrmann “has been one of my dearest friends my entire adult life. I think we probably met when I was 25-ish. The qualities he had as someone to make theater with is very much who he was as a person, I think. While our friendship was very much forged with the Hypocrites and theatermaking, I consider Kurt my family.”
In fact, Moe (who is now a company member with TimeLine Theatre) officiated at the wedding of Ehrmann and DeFrancesco in 2018. She shared her remarks from that ceremony with me, in which she provided a bulleted list of facts about Ehrmann. “Kurt can be loud. He can be gruff. He loves a good debate, almost to a fault. He is fiercely devoted to his loved ones. He is extremely generous. He often puts others before himself. He feels deeply. And he is full of so much love.”
Kurt Ehrmann and Mechelle Moe in Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (2007) Credit: Paul Metreyeon
Moe also noted to me that she and Ehrmann played husband-and-wife several times onstage for the Hypocrites, including in Graney’s 2003 acclaimed revival of Sophie Treadwell’s expressionist feminist classic, Machinal. “I would not have had the performance I had if he was not the person that offered me absolute trust and safety and space, and also was able to pull me back from very difficult places. At the same time he was offering a very beautiful performance that didn’t get the same accolades that mine did, but fully deserved it. [Moe won a non-Equity Jeff Award for her performance.] His part was so crucial in that.”
Moe and Ehrmann also played a married couple in Graney’s 2007 staging of Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. Ehrmann was a big fan of the Romanian-French playwright, having also appeared in Graney’s 2002 production of Rhinoceros. (Reader critic Jack Helbig’s review noted, “Kurt Ehrmann is especially good as an annoying bourgeois fussbudget who finds himself, during a rather routine conversation with the would-be hero—played superbly by Robert McLean—snorting and stamping and yearning to gallop free through the streets.”)
McLean, another longtime friend and collaborator of Ehrmann’s, told me they met in 1993, when Ehrmann came to see an evening of one-acts at the legendary (and long-gone) Cafe Voltaire basement theater in Lakeview where McLean was performing. “He was still in New York, but he came in to see it. We had one conversation on the curb after and I guess he decided he liked me then, but that was a one-off meeting. And then years later, our paths crossed again. I saw him in a play out at Oak Park Festival Theatre and we again spent a lot of time talking. And then a few years after that, we found ourselves in the chorus of Ajax [produced by the Hypocrites in 2001] together. And that’s when we really became friends.”
Kurt Ehrmann and his wife, Gianine DeFrancesco, with their godson, Emmett Grace Bateman Credit: Photo courtesy of Jennifer Grace
McLean and Jennifer Grace, another former ensemble member of the Hypocrites who performed in Ajax, also found a steadfast and loving pillar of support in Ehrmann when they both lost their spouses. McLean’s wife, Hypocrites actor Erin Myers, died of cancer at 41 in 2015. Grace moved to New York in 2009 with the Hypocrites’ landmark production (directed by David Cromer) of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, with her husband, actor Tom Bateman. (The two met while performing together in the Hypocrites’ 2002 production of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding.) Bateman also died in 2015. Ehrmann and DeFrancesco are godparents to Bateman and Grace’s son, Emmett.
Grace, who recently moved back to Chicago after living in California for several years after Bateman’s death, told me about the many ways Ehrmann stood up for her and her family. “He married my husband and I. He was so excited when he found out we were having a baby and he came out and introduced us to Gianine when my son was born, when we were still in New York. And when Tom died, he was one of the first people there. And he stayed for a long time. He went with me to pick up Tom’s ashes, because he knew I couldn’t do it by myself.”
McLean and Grace were both with DeFrancesco at the hospital when Ehrmann died. “I immediately apologized to them, like, ‘This has to be so hard for you,’” said DeFrancesco. “He’s one of their best friends, of course, but you can’t help but relive the pain of what they went through, and it’s just terrible.”
DeFrancesco met Ehrmann after she performed in a production of Harold Pinter’s Old Times at City Lit Theater in 2009 with Ehrmann’s friend Don Bender.
“He saw it and was very complimentary and I thought, ‘Oh, he’s really cute.’ And then I saw him a couple more times, like at Konak’s [the Andersonville bar is popular with Chicago theater artists] and whatever. I thought that if I saw him again, if nothing clicks this time, I’ll be like, ‘OK, he’s not interested.’” But DeFrancesco recalls that as soon as she saw him at the bar again, “He turned around and I saw the look on his face and I’m like, ‘OK.’” They went on a date the next week and quickly became a couple.
Kurt Ehrmann played Captain Ahab in Syracuse Stage’s 2012 production of Moby Dick. Credit: Courtesy Syracuse Stage
Despite being his actual wife, DeFrancesco (who now works primarily as a pilates instructor) never shared time onstage with Ehrmann. But they shared a large circle of friends and theatrical passions. She told me that, on their European honeymoon, they went to Paris and Ehrmann insisted on seeing Théâtre de la Huchette’s production of The Bald Soprano, which holds the record for the longest continually running show in history. She also had a first-row seat to his preparation process for roles over the years.
“He really relished the investigation of it, both just the research and the process of it and working and trying to polish it up, like figure out, ‘Where are we at?’ Really continuing to mine and mine and mine until you really found the answers, or what you thought were the answers, in the play. That’s what made him really happy, I think, doing that kind of work. And so his approach was very exacting, but it was also very free.”
Among her favorite performances of Ehrmann’s, DeFrancesco cites Endgame with the Hypocrites, but also an out-of-town production. In 2012, Ehrmann played Ahab in Syracuse Stage’s production of Moby Dick (adapted by Julian Rad from Herman Melville’s epic novel and directed by Peter Amster). And while Ahab is notable for his missing leg, Ehrmann had an extra obstacle to overcome: he was hit by a car while walking to the store during tech week and broke his elbow in six places. DeFrancesco said, “That Monday, he had surgery, and then he was in a cast, and they gave him a sling, and then they canceled that Wednesday night performance, and he went back onstage that Thursday.”
Kurt Ehrmann (L), Jennifer Grace, and Steven Wilson in the Hypocrites’ 2003 production of Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead Credit: Margaret Lakin
Grace recalled a Hypocrites production of Lanford Wilson’s Balm in Gilead in 2003 in which both she and Ehrmann were part of the large cast. “He played one of the cooks at the diner, and I played Ann, the prostitute. He created this whole backstory that he shared with me later. And he was like, ‘My whole thing was that I was in love with you. So you would come into the diner and I just was always looking out for you. And whenever you left, you know, I knew you were going to work, and I was worried about you.’ He was really great about filling in the gaps in the story to make real connections that were designed to support other people, but not overshadow people.”
Grace also noted, “Kurt was an only child. And I think he was looking for his siblings, and he was really good at adopting younger siblings in particular. Like he called me and Mechelle his little sisters. And I think that actually is true in the way that he drove me bonkers sometimes.”
Kurt Ehrmann (L) and Sara Sevigny in the Hypocrites’ 2008 production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera Credit: Margaret Lakin
Everyone I spoke with, and so many other people paying tribute to Ehrmann on social media, noted his endless enthusiasm for everything that caught his interest outside of theater, including music, art, and politics. McLean said, “He loved to be excited about something, and he was curious and wanted to know more about it. And he was also just so funny and had a very sardonic sense of humor, which I very much appreciate.”
McLean also recalls taking a road trip with Ehrmann to New Orleans a couple of years ago. “We drove and so the halfway point was Memphis. And he had heard about Stax Records. He had such a deep love of music on vinyl, which has rubbed off on me. He’s now got me into an expensive hobby, so thanks for that, I guess. Stax has this music academy attached to it that I think delighted him—that those two things were connected and existed together.”
DeFrancesco said that while Ehrmann’s taste in music was broad, funk was his all-time favorite. So it seems fitting that his family is asking that memorial contributions be made to the Stax Music Academy. She also noted that the outpouring of grief and love on Facebook and elsewhere has been comforting—even though Ehrmann refused to participate in social media.
“I do wish he could see how many people just thought he was brilliant onstage, brilliant in real life, and appreciated his deep friendship and loyalty. It’s just nice to see,” said DeFrancesco. “Because it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s my husband. That’s who I fell in love with.’ And everybody saw that too. And I knew that people felt that way before he passed. But it is really nice to to see that. And it’s not even cold comfort. It’s comfort. We have a wonderful community here.”
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