Tell us about your early days in Chicago.
When I first came to the city, I stayed on a friend's floor -
because nobody had any money - and I started working in the
theater. In 1985, David Mamet and a man I know named William H.
Macy said, "Why don't you start your own theater company?" Which
sounded to us like, "Why don't you build your own shuttle and go up
into space?" But we did. We were interns at the Goodman Theatre in
Chicago, and we decided to start a theater company. So I started
my career xeroxing for the wonderful Greg Mosher and making popcorn
in the microwave. We would summer up in
Vermont, but for the first
two years, we were in
Chicago, because Chicago is good to its arts.
The arts scene is a small town in a big city, with a loyal audience
base, and there are theatergoers who will give you a shot. In New
York, if you put on a terrible play, they might not give you
another chance. I spent two years in Chicago doing theater. My
friend Clark Greg and I drove in my little
Honda from New York; we
were all
NYU graduates. We did one of those nights like you do when
you are young: You leave at two o'clock in the morning because that
is when your restaurant shift is finished, and you load up the car.
We drove into Chicago as the sun was coming up, and it was the most
spectacular skyline I had ever seen - which goes right into the
architectural element of the city.
Okay, talk about the architecture. When you
travel around
Europe and see these beautiful cities that have been
there for hundreds of years, you get a little bit of an inferiority
complex. We are such a young country, and we have some pretty
cities but nothing that compares to
Paris or
Vienna or
Budapest -
until you get to Chicago. The architecture is just unbelievable.
You've got the Wrigley Building. You've got the
Sears Tower. You've
got the John Hancock Center - which they say is a beautiful
skyscraper if you ever take it out of the box. You've got the
[former] Montgomery Ward building. One of the most spectacular
things I did that first morning in the city was drive along Lake
Shore Drive. You have an urban landscape on one side, and on the
other, you have this inland, freshwater "ocean" - you can't see the
other shore. That's like nowhere else. When you're on Lake Shore
Drive, you have all these gorgeous buildings on your left and this
vast expanse of peaceful, gorgeous water on your right. The sun
comes up and sparkles off the water. One of the things we used to
do was go to Oak Street Beach, and from there you could see the
Navy Pier. Oak Street Beach is not as busy as North Avenue Beach.
You are in the middle of the city, yet you can take out your little
beach towel and lay out.