Screenwriter · Playwright · Novelist
Comedy with heart. Drama with soul.
Susan Lerner is a New York-based writer and former attorney. Her work explores what happens when personal aspirations collide with larger forces — history, politics, money, or love. Sometimes it’s funny. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking. Often both.
Screenplays
Comedy Feature
The Last Con
An aging con man, desperate to secure high-end care for his wife with dementia, involves his daughter in one last swindle that spins out of his control.
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels meets Matchstick Men
Half-Hour Family Comedy Pilot
Dylan P.I.
A film-noir-obsessed young woman uses ingenuity and her niece’s help to prove she can make it as a P.I. in 1980s suburbia.
Veronica Mars meets Hart of Dixie
One-Hour Drama Pilot
Dangerous Choices
Based on the novel A Suitable Husband
1930s Poland: a young Jewish woman is torn between the safe match her family demands and a daring Zionist leader who can take her somewhere new entirely.
Unorthodox meets Titanic
One-Hour Drama Pilot
Crossing Over
Based on the novel Children of Lies
An idealistic Jewish premed student falls for a Palestinian doctor and is drawn into a world that tests everything she believes.
Imposters meets Homeland
Plays
PLAYS
Alarmed
Short comedy
New Stage Play Festival, Evening of Comedy 2026, Vermont
When Goldie’s alarm goes off, the policeman dismisses her as just another confused old lady — even when there is an actual burglar in her home. But when the burglar unexpectedly returns, he and Goldie strike up an unlikely friendship.
Morning Coffee
Short play · dark comedy
Playfest 2024, Soapbox Stageworks, Monterey CA
On a Saturday morning in 1980s New York, a single working woman and her matchmaking mother spar over blind dates, nail polish, and family gossip — until an old stuffed doll unlocks a story Mom has never told. A bittersweet comedy about inherited grief and what daughters owe mothers who survived the unsurvivable.
A Meaningful Life
Ten-minute play
AMT New Works Summer Reading Festival, NYC · Commended, Jewish Plays Project
An idealistic young woman must deal with the consequences when she learns that the man she loves has a darker side.
Since You Left
Short play
When a young, married attorney meets an old flame for a drink, she justifies it as finding “closure.” But as they spar over past betrayals and present ambitions, she is forced to evaluate the choices she’s made and whether her current contentment is a genuine triumph or a catastrophic compromise.
A Taxing Moment
One-act · dark comedy
A darkly comic one-act set on New Year’s Eve 2010, in which three siblings keeping vigil at their dying mother’s bedside discover that the Holocaust survivor who spent her whole life hiding in plain sight had one final secret — and it changes everything.
The Hunk
Short play
Betty will do anything to get the attention of the man of her dreams. But is her dream man an illusion?
Watch
Videos
Dangerous Choices — Sizzle Reel
2.5-minute sizzle reel for the one-hour drama pilot set in 1930s Poland.
Earlier Work
Novels
Get in touch
Open to collaborations, productions, and conversations about her work.