Peter Sagal

Sagal has written several plays that have been performed across the United States and internationally.[10][11] Some have also been performed as radio plays or podcasts. For instance, Sagal's plays have been performed at:[13][10][11][14][15]

• Long Wharf Theater
• New York Stage and Film
• Actors Theatre of Louisville
• Seattle Repertory Theatre
• Florida Stage
• Illusion Theater
• City Theatre of Pittsburgh
• New York's Metropolitan Playhouse.

Sagal's plays include:[15]

• Denial – A Jewish lawyer defends the free speech rights of a Holocaust denier.
• Most Wanted – A comedy in which retired grandparents flee to Florida with baby granddaughter
• Kim's Sister
• What to Say
• Real Time
• Mall America – The aftermath of terror at Minnesota's famous mall[16]
• Milton Bradley (a podcast play) – a rabbi must eulogize a mother whose son can only say terrible things about her.[17]

Sagal has been awarded fellowships and grants, and commissioned by stage companies to write plays. These include:[13][10][11][14]

• Grants from
  • The Jerome Foundation
  • The McKnight Foundation
  • A residency grant from the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France
• Fellowships
  • The Charles MacArthur Fellowship from the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center[15]
  • Two Jerome Fellowships from the Playwrights' Center[15]
• Commissions to write new plays from
  • The Seattle Repertory Theatre
  • The Wind Dancer Theater
• Invitations to work on his plays at
  • Sundance
  • The National Playwrights Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center[15]
  • The New Harmony Project
  • PlayLabs[15]

Sagal has written screenplays,[18] one for a 1996 science fiction / martial arts thriller, Savage, another for Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, a 2004 sequel to the original Dirty Dancing, adapted from his screenplay Cuba Mine,[11][14] which Sagal said bears little resemblance to the poorly received film.[6]

Sagal has also written for television shows including,

• Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!: A Royal Pain in the News (TV Movie 2011)
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Live! (TV Movie 2013)
• Constitution USA with Peter Sagal (2013)

The two Wait Wait movies are based on the weekly NPR/WBEZ Chicago news quiz radio program which Sagal hosts.

Sagal on his "We the People" Harley Davidson motorcycle at the National Archives during filming for Constitution USA with Peter Sagal

Sagal voiced Clown's Joy in the 2015 animated movie Inside Out

He appeared as himself in the "Pay Pal" episode of the animated television series The Simpsons. In that episode characters Lisa and Tumi listened to an episode of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! featuring Sagal and announcer Carl Kasell.

Sagal has appeared as himself in documentaries and TV movies. These include

• Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!—TV movie in 2008
• Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!: A Royal Pain in the News—TV movie in 2011
• Wait Wait Don't Tell Me Live!—TV movie in 2013
• Constitution USA with Peter Sagal—PBS TV miniseries documentary in 2013[19][20]
• Narrator of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's performance of Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide[21][22]
• National Geographic Explorer—TV series documentary (hosted one episode) in 2016
• A Personal Journey Through and To The Constitution—based on the 2013 PBS documentary Constitution USA with Peter Sagal[23]

A runner of marathons, Sagal writes the Road Scholar column for Runner's World magazine.[24][25] He has also written for The New York Times Magazine,[26][17][27] the Chicago Tribune,[17][27] the Houston Chronicle,[17][27] and Time magazine.[28]

Sagal and the Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! team contributed a feature called Sandwich Monday to The Salt, NPR's food blog. For five years, each Monday the Wait Wait team ate a new and different kind of sandwich for lunch. Then one of the team members would write a tongue-in-cheek blog post describing the food.[29] Sandwiches included Fritos-topped Papa John's pizza,[29] latke double-down,[29] Passover Sandwich,[30] and Burger King's YUMBO.[31]

In the early 1990s while he was living in Minneapolis, Sagal was hired to ghostwrite an autobiography of the 1970s pornography director Gail Palmer.[4][13][14] Sagal discovered that Palmer did not direct the pornography movies attributed to her, and that she was a front for her pornographer boyfriend.[4] Peter wrote the book anyway. However, Palmer did not approve of the manuscript, and it has not been published.[4]

In October 2007 HarperCollins published Sagal's The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (and How to Do Them).[4][26] In the book Sagal revisits the Gail Palmer incident and indicates that his exposure to the porn industry led to his writing Book of Vice.[4] Publishers Weekly called Book of Vice, "a hilarious, harmlessly prurient look at the banality of regular people’s strange and wicked pleasures".[32]

• The Theater Visions Award for best new play from the Laurie Foundation[15]
• A DramaLogue award for directing[11][14]
• McCord Arts Prize from Harvard University[15]
• The Kurt Vonnegut Humor Award from the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis, Indiana.[33][34]
• Named one of the top ten Jewish entertainers from New Jersey by New Jersey Jewish News.[14][13][11]
• Creativity Award from Moment magazine in 2013.[27]