She’s a Republican English teacher from Utah. He’s a drag queen in San Francisco whose primary outlet isn’t lip sync but literature.
“I prefer to do my drag via writing,” Eddie Jen explains, “because high heels hurt too much.”
In his epistolary solo show “Seeking a Penpal for the End of the World,” now at the Marsh as part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, Jen recounts first writing a letter in 2013 to Mrs. Riley, the woman who helped instill a love of reading in his misfit adolescent self. As their correspondence unfolds through President Donald Trump’s first administration, then COVID, their odd-couple pairing charms. She’s polite but open-minded, while he overshares.
If you’ve ever wondered if you could genuinely connect with someone on the other side of the political spectrum (though Jen first reaches out to Mrs. Riley, aka Virginia, precisely because she writes an op-ed criticizing Trump), “Seeking a Penpal” inspires hope. In the show, Jen even starts to wonder, “If I met Virginia in high school as fellow students rather than as teacher and student, would we have become friends?”