In her solo show “Night Driver,” playwright-performer Pearl Ong recalls San Francisco as it looked in the late-1970s: perhaps a bit grimier than now but indisputably crackling with life and energy.
Onstage through April at The Marsh in San Francisco, “Night Driver” details her experiences as a queer Asian American woman taxi driver in San Francisco in the pre-Reagan era. While she encounters no shortage of colorful characters as she transports them across the region, an encounter with her own mother is what leaves the strongest impression on her.
Directed by David Ford, (who has been called “the dean of solo performance”), the 60-minute show had a successful premiere in 2024 during The Marsh’s inaugural In Front of Your Eyes Festival for femme and non-binary performers and writers. Ong won for “best newcomer” and the show won “best attended solo.”
Ford played a part in bringing the play to the stage. Ong says that after taking various memoir, comedy and fiction writing classes in fits and starts simply to amuse herself, with no clear goal in mind, she enrolled in one of Ford’s “Creating and Performing Your Own Work” classes at The Marsh in 2019. Describing it as “another step in this sort of bumbling around,” she started to think about pulling together short pieces she developed into a full-length piece.
She adds, “This is what came out. It was David who said, ‘This is a story about you and your mother.’”
Though the current “Night Driver” content is the same as last year’s presentation, Ong says, “I think my performance is better because I’ve had more practice, and I’m more settled in the script.”
Though the mother-daughter encounter is the heart of story, reminiscences of San Francisco comprise its spirited body. As the story moves from the 1970s to the ‘80s, the driver notices change in the city surrounding her.
Ong holds onto fond memories of San Francisco in the pre-AIDS, pre-internet era.
“What pops into my mind is always how exuberant and vibrant it was,” she recalls. “On warm nights, 18th and Castro at [last call for bars] was just a mass of people overflowing into the street. This was also true of The Stud on Folsom Street. There were more lesbian bars, and certainly more lesbian dance bars: Bay Brick Inn, Amelia’s, A Little More (which I sometimes thought of as A Lot Less). … Right now, we have Mother and Jolene’s, but there was a long time when there were none. For good or for bad, there was way more partying.”
Ong also recalls was how public attitudes toward the LGBTQ+ community were evolving. HIV and AIDS simultaneously made queer folk scapegoats in conservative eyes and sympathetic victims for the charitable.
Some prejudices haven’t changed in the 21st century, Ong maintains.
Referring to recent anti-queer policies put in place by the Trump administration, Ong says, “It’s a precarious time for the country and for the world. The pendulum always swings back, but there has been so much dismantling of all that’s good about this country.”
But she adds, “At the same time, I don’t think that all the LGBTQ+ progress we’ve made can be totally dislodged from the national psyche. Overall, there’s still progress.”
Thinking about her show and wishes for the Chinese Year of the Snake—including, she says, “good health, collapse of the Putin regime, Democrats take back the House, [and] someone very powerful chokes on a Big Mac”—Ong adds that one element of “Night Driver” that bridges San Francisco’s past and present is the city’s ongoing open embrace of eclectic characters: “San Francisco will always have natural beauty, people from all over the world and great food,” she concludes.
“Night Driver” continues through April 5 at The Marsh, 1062 Valencia St., San Francisco. Tickets are $25 to $100 at themarsh.org.
Charles Lewis III is a San Francisco-born journalist and performing artist. He has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED and the San Francisco Examiner. Dodgy evidence of this can be found at The Thinking Man’s Idiot.wordpress.com.
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