Drama Masks: Chasing ghosts of SF past in ‘Night Driver’

This is Drama Masks, a Bay Area performing arts column from a born San Franciscan and longtime theatre artist in an N95 mask. I talk venue safety and dramatic substance, or the lack thereof.

Keep calm and carry on: It’s that weird time of year for Bay Area theatre folks. August is always a bit quiet, performance-wise. As schools begin new semesters and office-types return from holiday, August sees major summer productions wind down, season announcements begin ramp up, and certain local performers and designers prep for Burning Man (the appeal of which continues to elude me).

In regard to that second item, this rough year has produced fewer proper 2025-26 announcements than usual. I’ve seen more autumn notices of particular shows and tours. My inbox is full of nudges toward Halloween shows (Peaches Christ has another Terror Vault tour at the SF Mint), hoofers from Chitresh Das to Theatre Flamenco have shows planned, and nearly everyone has jingle bells on the brain, even though the summer’s not over.

Despite the tumultuous year—nay, years—that precede these particular announcements, what stood out to me was the normalcy of them. Not banality, mind you (although, certain shows make me roll my eyes), but rather the insistence to carry on as they have before. From certain major houses, this may seem like an attempt to bury their heads in the sand as the world continues to burn; for indie companies, it comes off more like that “rebellious joy” I may have mentioned once or twice in this column.

The Toddlers-in-Chief have spent the last half-year shredding public services and cutting public funds to the point where the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (producers of Sesame Street) have announced that they’ll be closing down before the end of the year. If someone that high-profile winds up on the chopping block, it’s only natural for unknown smaller companies to despair.

Yet, those smaller companies are the ones pushing forward with steely determination. They’re the ones in a staring contest with the DOGE-bags in DC, and the indie folks aren’t willing to blink. They’re the ones being deliberately targeted for highlighting PoC/queer/immigrant/feminist/leftist/educational work, and the most defiant thing they’ve done is continue to produce it when they no longer stand on solid ground. (Though, let’s be honest: that ground was less-than-solid before 2025.) 

The administration has incalculable power at its disposal, but continues to publicly tear itself apart. (If their newfound apotheosis of Sydney Sweeney isn’t desperation, I don’t know what is? No one’s forgotten the Epstein files.) Meanwhile, independent marginalized artists continue to show real leadership in the way they continue to march ahead like their lives depend on it – which they might.

Don’t get me wrong: there are lots of things about supposedly-progressive Bay Area theatre folks which still pisses me off. (A few are just now speaking out in support of Gaza, but shocking number still haven’t.) But seeing an e-mail from Lorraine Hansberry Theatre about their September show at Magic Theatre is actually reassuring after hearing about The Magic’s recent paused production.

Let the DOGE-bags flail about like dying fish. The rest of us will still be marching when those fish stop a-floppin’.

NIGHT DRIVER AT THE MARSH-SF

I’ve read Violet Blue’s memoir A Fish has No Word for Water in several different forms, both before and after it was published. I forget which version it was, but there’s one point where the SF-born author reminisces about our hometown’s numerous changes before concluding that “SF will never be what you remember”. I remember first reading that line and mentally comparing to Roy Batty’s famous “tears in the rain” line from Blade Runner. Time marches forward and our beloved city will continue to evolve—for better and for worse—as it has through the centuries.

I thought of it again when I went to The Marsh this past weekend to watch Pearl Ong reminisce about arriving here from Hong Kong in the pre-AIDS era before she found a job as a programmer. Her solo play, Night Driver (through August 23 at The Marsh-SF), isn’t a nostalgic jaunt back through the wonderful, pre-Reagan era of SF—where our humble narrator found her queerness driving a cab—but rather a means gazing back with astonishment that she’s able to tell the story.

Ong recalls growing up in an affluent Hong Kong family made up of various members on mainland China’s socio-economic ladder. She recalls her mother taking her to tailored fittings and riding in rickshaws to fancy restaurants. She also recalls a particular aunt who turned her nose up at their side of the family for not being good enough. When Ong and her parents move to Los Angeles, she adjusts to living “nouveau-poor” in an address that’s still technically Beverly Hills. She discovers the joys of casual drug use and eating TV dinners.

Yet, her real awakening comes after her parents divorce and Ong follows her mother the City by the Bay. To pay for her university, Ong gets a job driving a cab. It’s what leads her to landing in lesbian bars, where she discovers a queerness she’d already suspected as a girl in Catholic school. Between driving clients to the Tenderloin, and doing lines at Scott’s (“the lesbian Cheers”), she slowly begins to discover herself without having to compromise her journey to anyone’s preconceived notions.

Ong isn’t interested in taking anyone on a tour, just getting from one place to another. That’s not just true of her driving a cab, but also in telling her story. It’s not to say that she neglects necessary details, but rather to notice that she doesn’t waste time in overly-detailing the sights and sounds of SF-gone-by. She recalls places with a normalcy one would expect from someone living in the present, not adding hyperbole to a place’s hindsight significance. For instance, when she recalls having a revelatory dinner at “Original Joe’s on Eddy,” I couldn’t help but think of how that place later became the late lamented PianoFight, but 1970s-Pearl Ong doesn’t know that.

The few times she does add hindsight, it’s usually for a catchy zinger related to queer dating: When (somewhat) bemoaning that lesbians were limited to finding one another in bars way back when, she quips that “Decades later, we’ll have new choices—like AA.” When the stress of life begins to take its toll, she asks the knowingly destructive question, “Why do people go to therapy when they can do cocaine?”

What’s more, she wants for her mother not to worry about her. It was a relief for this play to 1) not exaggerate its narrator’s relationship with a parent; 2) avoid “dragon lady” stereotypes; and 3) keep the mother-daughter subplot just out of reach so as not to dominate, yet close enough to where its significance in the finale feels earned. Ong may not be a professional speaker or performer (she began in earnest at the late Stage Werx in 2019), but she’s developed a raconteur’s knowledge of focusing on the interesting parts of the story, and not lose the audience’s focus. Given the details of the play, that may come, in part, from hanging out in bars, where everyone tries to hold court at least once. In any case, it pays off well for the hour she tells her life story.

A week after opening night, there were maybe two others masked in the audience. Given that the Marsh rep doing the curtain speech said she’d just come back from a long illness, I was certainly glad to have my Flo Mask firmly in place. The audience looked to be about 70-75% full, yet CO² levels on my Aranet4 only peaked around 1,088ppm by the end of the hourlong show.

I’ve been saying for years that my problem with “the story of San Francisco” is that it’s often told by people who come here rather than those from here. Pearl Ong is someone who came here, but she doesn’t fall into the “SF is over” trap that ensnares most other transplants. Her SF story is unique because it’s a personal story about someone whose live is shaped by the place she’s in. It can be many people’s story. Hers is captivating.

NIGHT DRIVER runs through August 23 at The Marsh-SF. Tickets and further info here.