!["I really thought I'd make a living at [playwriting]. Which was psychotic!" - Lewis Black](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/8a05072/2147483647/strip/true/crop/3000x1687+0+0/resize/840x472!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.npr.org%2Fassets%2Fimg%2F2015%2F01%2F08%2F1046616461_wide-303418eeaf1f6eefee888217a4fc2db7d5c19e0d.jpg)
Comedian Lewis Black once dreamed of being a playwright. After receiving his MFA from Yale Drama School, he moved to New York City and staged plays at the West Bank Cafe, including early works by Aaron Sorkin and Alan Ball and featuring then-unknown actors like James Gandolfini.
"We did more new, American one-act plays than any theater in the country. Nobody did more. And what we learned was--nobody cares."
For his Ask Me Another Challenge, Black dusted off his degree to lead a Pyramid-style game in which he had to get a contestant to guess the names of famous plays without using any of the words in their titles. What plays comes to mind with the words "New Orleans" or "witches"?
This episode originally aired January 8, 2015.
Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
