by Lee Roscoe
Susan Jeremy makes comedy out of serious subjects, a kind of laugh therapy to alleviate pain for herself and the audience and promote personal growth. With her one-woman play Robert Will Show You the Door, which she performs this week at Red Room, she says if she hadn’t been fired from her jobs, she may not have overcome those obstacles to find her best talents and self-worth; each disaster was a way forward. “You take something painful and find humor in it; if there’s no humor, you don’t move on,” she says, continuing, “so humor’s especially important in these times as a way of looking at something disturbing to be able to process it.”
She’s based in Brooklyn and talks about how there’s a “jumpy feeling of unease” on the streets and subways of New York from the current political situation. Indeed, Jeremy, whose mother is Italian and whose late father was French-Canadian, got her Canadian citizenship in January after the Trump inauguration.
In her work, she doesn’t just craft the funny lines and one-liners that go with comedy, she also is very physical, embodying the 15 characters she portrays in this (and her eight other one-woman shows) by the way they walk, their mannerisms—the way they use their arms, their voices, the way they may speak rapidly, with an accent or tone, or an upward swing. She mentions that in her stand-up routines, she’ll even “give voice to inanimate objects and animals, too. Like the cow which got loose in Queens and ended up at a fancy retirement home. I tell it from the cow’s point of view.”
She started being funny at around age eight, “as a way of being seen and heard,” she says, as she was the youngest child with a gap of many years between her and her older brother and sister. She’d put on her mother’s fashion wigs and emulate Lily Tomlin, winning second prize at a Long Island talent show with an imitation of Tomlin’s Ernestine (“one ringy dingy, two ring dingy”), losing first place to a boy who imitated Bette Davis and Judy Garland, and who she says must, surely, be a drag queen now. Her dad bought her hand puppets, and she’d also perform in the backyard.
She’s paid her dues as professional entertainer, starting young, working as a stilt walker for bar mitzvahs, as a clown, graduating to stand-up starting at 22, in Vegas by the age of 27, on the comedy club circuit with the likes of Joy Behar, Ellen DeGeneres, and Jim Carrey, working cruise ships, working women’s events, working wherever the work was. Then, burning out at 33, she attended college.
“That’s what Brooke Shields did, and I always wanted to be Brooke Shields,” she explains. College allowed her to step back and see what else she could do; it showed her she could write, and while she still does stand-up, she’s mostly concentrated on her one-woman, multi-character plays.
It took her time to be able to show her authentic self and come out of the closet in her comedy. Provincetown helped her do that. She performed PS 69 at the UU in Provincetown all summer over a decade ago, about a lesbian teacher who’s a stripper at night. And it took some guts. She recalls taking the show from Edinburgh to Stone Mountain, Georgia, where the audience laughed at the first half of the show, and then was completely silent when it turned out the teacher in the play was gay. She’s performed at many venues in Provincetown, including the Crown & Anchor, and the A-House, both with solo shows and stand-up. She roller-skated around the streets to promote her shows, sometimes biking with her pug in a front basket passing out fliers. She mentions a story of Provincetown serendipity about losing a favorite necklace at a guest house in town and then seeing it on a woman at the beach the following summer, who willingly gave it back to her!
“I love the artist energy, the sunset, the light, the people in the streets. I took some writing classes there at FAWC,” she says.
Robert Will Show You the Door starts at age 12 and takes us through years of her work experiences. One firing was at 16 when she worked at Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. “I didn’t see eye to eye with the manager. I got fired for whistling while cleaning the windows…I have an annoying whistle,” she says, proceeding to ventriloquize a bird-like chirping. She says she cried, wondering why he couldn’t have just fired her on the phone rather than having her father drop her off, and then, with no ride home, having to walk. She’s been a roller-skate cigarette girl at Laguna Beach, an usher at Radio City Music Hall (where she seated her idol Carol Burnett), a catering waiter, a substitute teacher in a teen psych ward, and more. But all the time she thought she needn’t really bother because movie stardom awaited her.
From the age of 38 on, she says, “I never got fired again.” She became a special ed teacher; it gave her financial security and made her old dreams more attainable as she reentered the performing world.
With plenty of fodder for characters and comedy from her life experiences, Robert Will Show You the Door (and all Jeremy’s shows), is a cathartic and much-needed trip: intelligent, funny and compassionate.
Robert Will Show You the Door is performed nightly, October 15 – 18, 5:30 p.m. at Red Room, 258 Commercial St., Provincetown. For ticketes ($51.50 VIP/$41.50) and information visit redroom.club.
