|
Photo: Kathryn Aiken |
Peter Sagal
Host
Peter Sagal has been the host of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me since May, 1998. A native of Berkeley Heights, N.J., he attended Harvard University and subsequently squandered that education while working as a literary manager for a regional theater, a stage director, an actor, an extra in a Michael Jackson video, a travel writer, an essayist, a ghost writer for a former adult film impresario and a staff writer for a motorcycle magazine. He is the author of numerous plays that have been performed in large and small theaters around the country and abroad, including Long Wharf Theater, Actors Theater of Louisville, Seattle Repertory, and Florida Stage. He has also written a number of screenplays, including Savage, a cheesy vehicle for obscure French kickboxer Olivier Gruner, and Cuba Mine, an original screenplay that became, without his knowledge, the basis for Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.
Among Sagal's honors are a DramaLogue award for directing, grants from the Jerome and McKnight Foundations and a residency grant at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France. He has been commissioned to write new plays by the Seattle Repertory Theater and the Wind Dancer Theater and has been invited to work on his plays at Sundance, the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and the New Harmony Project.
With Wait Wait, Peter has traveled around the country, playing to sold-out theaters from Seattle to Akron, Ohio, and many points in between. He's asked Salman Rushdie about PEZ dispensers, Sen. John McCain about drive-through topless joints, and inquired as to Madeleine Albright's weightlifting accomplishments. He also wrote the introduction and contributed much of the material to the Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me quiz book, and can juggle three balls pretty well. He lives near Chicago with his wife, Beth Sagal, and their three daughters.
|
|
