Setting out on a three-city Canadian tour after knocking down an opening in NYC for your one-woman show can really perk someone up - stand you up straight to take on that touring run. Ask Susan Jeremy, she’d agree with you. She’ll maybe tell you she believed the omens were pointing to the right start for the right show when the NYC showcase her latest (of 8) solo shows, ROBERT WILL SHOW YOU THE DOOR (Tales of Being Fired), got such a warm reception.
But when you talk to Susan about this, follow quickly with “when exactly was it, that the sold out show was set to stage?” Then, if you sit in the quiet and let her, she’ll let you know. Wait for the stormclouds to clear from her ears, don’t make any sudden movements when her lip snarls with the memory, but you may want to pay attention enough to duck; If she grits her teeth in such frustration that a shard of pearly white enamel shatters free and missiles into your eye, be ready.
Don’t bother, don’t bring it up, I’ll tell you - it was March. It was March of 2020 and, well, theaters weren’t able to honor those sell outs, were they? The proverbial Robert was here again and that meant his Door wasn’t too far behind. He was sweeping this place clean!
The silver lining for Susan - and for us, let’s be honest - is that the 3 decade+ Provincetown-regular is coming back next week and bringing ROBERT with her. She’ll be doing 4 consecutive nights at Red Room, Weds-Sat, 15-18 Oct - 530p shows.
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Of course, we’re kidding, this is nothing like her - Susan is naturally, not overly, but simply self-aware. She takes the injustice in stride, knowing that she’s not alone and has innate confidence \that she’s going to pivot and re-settle.
She’s also not alone and she knows it. Masses of people’s lives were dealt blows since those years. Think about opening a restaurant on Valentine’s Day! And where are the tears for the birthday candle industry? Where Susan will stand apart is under the banner of Resilience. Ability to pull a bounce-back is essential. In the years intervening, she’s kept the show healthy and has been able to tour it for years. By mid-2026 ROBERT will have been seen on stages in 4 countries on 2 continents. Let’s doff a cap to her.
The Ricky Ricardo of the Concord Hotel
AKA the Father of the Doogie Howser of Ringing Bros and Barney & Bailey. Our heroine, the offspring of a dancer/choreographer dad (did you see him mambo on the Fred Warring Show?) and a now 100 year old poker hustling mom (did she take your lunch money?), passed the audition to take her show on the road with the biggest game in town, the actual Ringling Bros, at the tender age of 16. The young lass, who would go on to stilt-walk in Vegas and train as a clown, couldn’t get the permission slip signed for that field trip, so the elephants and trapeze danglers had to go on without her. But the groundwork was laid.
Maybe it was about then that Susan came down with an advanced case of the Bob Fosses. The way some folks run from bees or shrimp because they’ll seemingly inflate if rubbed the wrong way, Susan kept her distance from the square job routine. Maybe she wasn’t running around backstage at topless burlesque shows but she wasn’t quite the paper route type.
At 18 she ran off of Long Island into the warm, peachfuzzy, open arms of Greenwich Village. Who could blame her? And having dispensed with normalcy as it’s known (or at least as it was known then), she made the full commitment to her purest of preferences: stand-up comedy and the love of a good woman. Again, who could blame her?
But courage now isn’t made of the stuff it once was, sorry. The barrier to entry to the hallowed halls of that descriptor, of planting a flag and defending its right to the wind, may have meant a bottle to the side of the head or, if you were getting off easy, some unkind words at high volume. There were no congratulations in the days of yore for our favorite, Susan Jeremy. We do, however, count her among those who swam upstream.
Cash? Check? Cocaine?
With the Village in her pocket, our girl set out to Manifest Destiny and made her way out to LA and put in the obligatory couple of years in Hollywood. She took her act on the road with a couple other comedians and lived that life Dave Attell blasted with his flashlight. A pushed through recount laced with gropes, paychecks left on bartops in bumps, and lint ball memories she can pull from her pockets at will sounded like it happened in black & white.
If a stage performer is sponging up characters, sometimes they’ll opt for the airport or the mall for premier people-watching … Susan’s known to take it up a couple notches and scuff her shoes as she does. In 2003 she was in Edinburgh at the Fringe Festival and busked her way to a warm place to stay and likely some new material. You think courage is hard to come by 20 years later, try paying for a place to stay at Edinburgh’s comedy festival by busking the days away. Not so much.
Dyslexia’s A Bicth
A decade after she hatched in her NYC home, the rubber met the road with her original work as well and Susan started taking classes and laying some structural cheesecloth onto the up until then untamable style of creative life she was living. Here’s where her writing chops are given a berth. Gradually she moved away from stand-up and gravitated to the page, to the less extemporaneous, the deliberate, and the curated.
From a bird’s eye, her step into form looks like a hummingbird finding its way into a maze and innately winding the path to center. And it’s possible that the center is her most prolific period. Since she’s slid into that suit and found a kindred spirit to write with her (hello Mary Fulham!), she’s turned out these 8 shows (5 with her co-writer, though ROBER was written by Susan solo) and has played as many as 24 characters on stage (PS 69). For a person who spent a large part of her life (the entirety, up to that point) with undiagnosed dyslexia, this begs no less of a nod than the perseverance it took to bounce back from Covid slashing her tires.
And here is where I find the greatest cause for celebration and admiration of our starlet. She’s a singular mold who seems to have needed each of the lumps she took .Or if she didn’t need them, she reflects upon them as if they’re essential to the progression that brought her to the here now.
That high-revving motor she’s got pumping in her core has her still taking classes (guitar, to finally avenge on the boos from her high school band performances), traveling internationally to tour her shows, writing new ones, always seemingly in a writing course.
Free Parking
So it happened that, after avoiding the plague of predictable, everyday, by-rote living, she took a job - just shy of 4 decades on the lam - as a middle school special education teacher and a 7th grade health instructor, probably doing what she could to stifle her own giggles when she had to say “penis” in front of 13 year olds.
After 7 years of that, Susan finally found the spot that fit her in the square folks’s world: she’d spend the next 17 years teaching kids with disabilities in hospitals and at their homes. That one-on-one sounds to me like its own spin on a performance, practicing soliloquies, and prompted dialogue exchanges, but let’s not let the cynic in … this was a gig that suited her, that gave her a bulletproof NYC parking permit, and the sick days to use up for performances when necessary. Because for some people playing hooky to get on stage and perform is as necessary as a switchblade.
With the cushion firmly inflated beneath her, she’d continue her trips to Provincetown to perform, as she had been since the early 90s. The Cape Codder, surprisingly, wasn’t offering $30/night rooms anymore so the stays will fluctuate but they don’t disappear. Like everything else, Susan Jeremy will prove that even the nightmare of Ptown housing and its bee-sting levels of inflation cannot keep her from enjoying what she wants. If they haven’t figured it out by now, what’s the point trying to help them understand?
