By JOANNE WEINTRAUB

Journal Sentinel TV critic

Last Updated: March 21, 2001

It's not that Joan Cusack hasn't tried, over the years, to become more 90210. It's just that, in some mysterious but bone-deep way, she's congenitally, irreversibly 60202.

So she's very grateful that "What About Joan," her new ABC sitcom, which premieres at 8:30 p.m. Tuesday on Channel 12, is being taped not in Beverly Hills or Burbank but on the west side of Chicago, just a few postal zones away from the Evanston, Ill., neighborhood where she grew up. Sometimes, if you're good enough at what you do, you get to pick your own ZIP code.

The 38-year-old Cusack, who earned her stripes at Chicago's celebrated Story Theatre and the Ark Repertory Theater in Madison, is good enough and then some.

With 30 movies and two Oscar nominations - for 1988's "Working Girl" and 1997's "In & Out" - to her credit, Cusack is a distinctive comic presence, the kind of offbeat character actress who can upstage the leads without even trying. Film critic Molly Haskell, in a recent New York Times essay, singled her out as one of the last of a vanishing breed of "wise and wisecracking (women) in the venerable sidekick tradition."

The problem is, working in films usually means working in Southern California, 2,000 miles away from the Chicago home Cusack shares with her husband, Internet attorney Dick Burke, and their two children, 31/2-year-old Dylan and 9-month-old Miles.

Besides, she admits, Hollywood's unwritten but unbreakable rules - do lunch at this place, be seen with that person - drive her a little crazy.

"It can really get to you," Cusack says in a phone interview from Chicago, where she has just finished taping an episode of the show. "You try to do your work and ignore it, but it's hard not to look over your shoulder. There's always someone funner and hipper and richer and cooler and younger than you are."

In "What About Joan," Cusack plays Joan Gallagher, a high school teacher who's fun but isn't particularly cool, thin or rich. She's surrounded by a banker boyfriend (Kyle Chandler, "Early Edition") and an assortment of mildly quirky friends and associates (Wallace Langham, Donna Murphy, Kellie Williams, Jessica Hecht).

Like Cusack, the show's creator, Gwen Macsai, is a graduate of Evanston High School and an alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But, separated by several years, they'd never met before the show brought them together - or, if you accept Macsai's version of events, they'd met very, very briefly.

"I'm positive Joan did my makeup in (a high school production of) 'Fiddler on the Roof' in 1978," Macsai says, "though she denies it. She doesn't remember me, but I remember her."

What nobody denies is that the real matchmaker was James L. Brooks, the prolific writer, director and producer whose credits include "Terms of Endearment," "As Good as It Gets," "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and the "The Simpsons."

A few years ago, after hearing some of Macsai's wry commentary on National Public Radio, Brooks contacted her and optioned her work for production. Macsai's radio essays, some of which are collected in her 2000 book, Lipshtick," feature the sort of personal observations on growing up female that touch a universal chord. Brooks believed they had series potential.

A natural pairing

When Cusack became available - on the condition that she wouldn't have to move her family - the pairing of comedy writer and comic actress seemed like a natural to Brooks, who had directed Cusack in the small but hilarious role of a jittery go-fer in "Broadcast News." To make things even sweeter, Macsai, who still lives in Evanston with her husband and three children, could stay put, too.

"Before I was married, I think moving to Hollywood would have seemed incredibly glamorous," says Macsai, who serves as one of the show's writer-producers. "But at this point in my life, it doesn't have much appeal."

Macsai attended UW-Madison for just two years before moving on, but Cusack graduated with a degree in English and philosophy.

"My father, that wise man, told me that I should learn as much as I could about as many things as possible in college," Cusack says. "And I didn't know at that point whether I could really make a career out of acting."

Cusack was still in grade school when her parents, hoping to cure her self-consciousness, sent her to a theater workshop for kids. There, acting was literally child's play - "I remember sitting on a pretend bus and a pretend train," she says - and Cusack quickly took to it.

Next came improvisation work with Story Theatre. At just 16, thanks to her stage training, she won a role in the low-budget teen hit "My Bodyguard."

Joan of Ark

With Madison's Ark group - based in the famously funky Club de Wash in the Hotel Washington, which has since burned down - Cusack got the chance to do more improv work.

"I got a real education in theater there, even though it wasn't a formal education," she says. "Improvisation is great for developing a voice."

Cusack's film career has continued to build from small roles in movies such as "Sixteen Candles" to meatier ones in "Grosse Pointe Blank" and "High Fidelity," the latter two starring her younger brother, John.

But apart from a single forgettable season, 1985-'86, in "Saturday Night Live," Cusack has done little television.

She and Macsai hope the new show's Chicago base will give it a slightly different look and feel from other sitcoms. If nothing else, they say, working with fellow Midwesterners has been a pleasant experience.

They also report that the West Coast types who came east to work on the series had a little trouble adjusting to this howling bear of a Chicago winter.

Macsai, thoughtful Midwestern girl that she is, even provided a set of itch-free long underwear to the show's shivering head writer.

"I just felt so sorry for him," she says, laughing.

As for Cusack, she welcomed every snowflake, storm cloud and Windy City gust.

Her brother and frequent acting partner, happily ensconced near Los Angeles, likes to remind Cusack that she's 2,000 miles from where the real action is. She reminds him that there's plenty of action in a household occupied by two children under the age of 4.

"I love visiting John," she says. "It's just that - well, you know. I wouldn't want to live there."

Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on March 22, 2001.