Interview: Pearl Ong of NIGHT DRIVER at The Marsh

When Pearl Ong expresses surprise to find herself performing at The Marsh you’d better believe this is not just false modesty. After retiring as a computer programmer, she took a class with The Marsh’s David Ford purely as a lark, thinking it might be fun to get up in front of her classmates and make them laugh a little. She’d never been onstage before, never even considered it a possibility. What she hadn’t taken into account was that she had a uniquely fascinating back story to tell and that Ford is the guru of coaxing captivating solo theater pieces out of the most unlikely of writer-performers. After a few more classes and some time for the material to marinate, Ford convinced her she had a show. Ong performed it at last summer’s The Marsh’s In Front of Your Eyes Performance Festival, where it won the awards for Best Newcomer and Best Attended Solo Show.

Clearly, and much to Ong’s amazement, she was onto something as that show, Night Driver, is now enjoying an extended run at The Marsh through April 5th. Promising to “take audiences on the unexpected journeys of a model minority gone rogue,” Ong’s show vividly conjures up the free-spirited gay scene in San Francisco from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, blending humor, rebellion, and cultural clashes. But what else would you expect from someone raised in a cosseted Hong Kong environment whose life took her though various left turns until she found herself in San Francisco driving cabs at night and carousing at the dance clubs?

I spoke to Ong by phone last week shortly after she had started this run of her show. We talked about how the show came about, seminal memories of the City’s wilder days in the 1970s, and how despite the drugs and various escapades her show recounts it’s really about her relationship with her mother. Ong is a fascinating interviewee – direct and down-to-earth and about as “unslick” as any performer I’ve ever talked to. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

The logline for Night Driver says it “takes audiences on the unexpected journeys of a model minority gone rogue.” Could you unpack that a little for me? What do you think your show is about?

It’s a bit of a different trajectory, I suppose, a bit of cab driving, some drugs, being gay, immigrating, that sort of thing. It’s really a story about one person’s journey and it’s also about my relationship with my mother throughout all that time.

You obviously have a fascinating back story, but what gave you the notion to turn it into a theater piece?

You know, I never thought I’d be doing this. As with all things in my life, it’s all serendipity. I started out in 2019 in David Ford’s class of people creating and performing their own work because I was getting close to retirement and thinking “I really like to make people laugh.” You know how you go to dinner parties or hang out with friends and you tell stories and people laugh, and you think “Well, that was really fun.”?

So I started with that and thought I would just tell some cab driving stories, and the it was a matter of trying to knit them together to make it some kind of narrative. It morphed into something else, a more personal story, as the class progressed and I read pieces I’d written before about certain things that happened in my life. David and other class members asked questions and I would flesh it out, this bit or that bit.

Because part of the class was performing, then I had to perform it, which I wasn’t really ready for. My initial reaction was “Well, this is prose. I don’t know how to perform this.” Through his tutelage, I was able to bring it to life to some degree onstage. And because the class had a performance aspect to it, I thought, “Well, I gotta do it. It’s part of the class. I can’t just bug out here.”

So I did it, and someone saw the performance, actually Bruce Pachtman at Stage Werx, who ran Solo Sundays there. He asked me to do it again at Solo Sundays, and I thought, “Oh, wow, great. That’s a one-shot deal.” You know, I did this one class, I got this one chance to perform, and invited everybody I knew cause I thought “I’ll never do this again.” And then this happened.

I’ve interviewed lots of different kinds of people who have developed and performed solo shows at The Marsh, and they’ve all worked with David. What do you think is his “secret sauce?”

He takes people wherever they are and helps you to develop your story. He makes suggestions and he’s very, very gentle. I mean, he would never say, “Oh, my god, that’s so boring. Maybe you should talk about something else.” [laughs] People come in with a whole play, with different characters or a musical – whatever. He can work with anybody and make them the best that they can be, with whatever it is, the ideas that they have and what they want to do with it. It’s a real gift.

David’s great at telling you what your story is about, cause he gets the throughline, where I’m just going like “Well, this happened and then that happened, this was sort of interesting and this was funny.” You know? Night Driver is really maybe about four pieces put together, with different things dropped and other things added. Over the course of a few years, I would take a class here and there, and at the end he said, “Maybe you should do a solo piece. Really this is also about you and your mother.” And I thought “Oh, yeah, that’s right. It is about me and my mother.” It’s really helpful to have that perspective, cause [otherwise] I’m just going through a narrative of random memories that I think might be interesting to call out.

You started working as a taxi driver in the late 1970s. Didn’t the famous Scorsese/DeNiro movie give you any trepidations about that?

You know, I never saw that movie for some reason. I did go see a lot of movies, but I was mostly into foreign films. I don’t know why I never saw that movie. It’s on my list.

Well, I remember seeing it and it scared the crap out of me. [laughs]

Yeah, I didn’t see it, so maybe that was a good thing.

Driving a cab at night is something I cannot imagine doing. What was the best and worst thing about it as a job?

Oh, it’s still one of my favorite jobs ever. The best thing is you do whatever you want, you’re your own boss. How many jobs can you say that of? I mean, if I picked up the cab and decided to go home and watch TV, I could do that. You still have to pay for the cab and the gas and everything, but… it was super fun.

I really like to drive, and the fact that I learned to understand what they were saying on the dispatch radio was a huge accomplishment, also actually finding my way around town was a big accomplishment. It’s like a giant board game, right? They call the locations, you check in and then they give you the order, you get to it, you drop people off and then you go to the next location. That’s when it’s busy, but when it’s slow then it’s competitive. You have to grab that call and tell them where you are, and they give it to the closest person. On slow nights, you could grab the call, but because nobody else has anything else to do, they go and check up on the fact that you said that you were where you said you were. And if they get there first, it’s their ride. Cause you coulda been lying.

I guess the worst part is that something bad might happen, and then you’d have to deal with it.

You and I are close to the same age, but I didn’t move to San Francisco until 1983 so I’ve always felt like I missed out on the formative years of the gay scene in the late 70s. Do you have any seminal memories of that time?

You know the thing that strikes me most from now is that before AIDS, the Castro especially, also the Stud on Folsom Street, on warm nights on the weekends at 2AM when everybody had to leave, they would just block intersections because there were so many people hanging out, you know coming out of the clubs and not wanting to go home. That was big. It was constant cab rides between, say Castro and Market, Castro & 18th and Church & Market, just back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Also, a lot of calls from the baths.

Before I started driving a cab, when I first moved here, I think it was 1975-76, I remember driving down Market Street as a civilian. Around Van Ness and Market as I’m heading downtown, standing on the median waiting for the streetcar was this really big man. He was a drag queen, but he looked like a wide receiver, you know? He was really tall and really built, and he had on like a green miniskirt and matching green knee-high boots and a purse over his shoulder. And a car going in the opposite direction decided that they were going to snatch his purse. As they passed by, the passenger leaned out the window and grabbed his purse. They probably thought it was really funny, you know?

The light changed and I had to keep going, but the last thing I saw was that he was not letting go of that purse - cause it matched his boots! He had the guy dragged halfway out of the car window, and the driver didn’t know what to do. Was he gonna keep going? I mean, his friend was really about to be dragged out of the car window. I thought that was really funny, so perfectly San Francisco. It's one of my favorite stories, like of all the people you decide you’re gonna snatch his purse?!

Another thing I somehow missed out on was the Valencia Rose back in its heyday –

Ah, yes!

- where performers like Lea DeLaria, Marga Gomez and Whoopi Goldberg got their starts. Were you a part of that scene?

I saw Whoopi Goldberg there. Shortly after that she went to Broadway with her show and that’s when she got famous. I wasn’t part of that scene, but I would go and watch people at those places. I never thought I’d be a performer.

Looking at your career history, you’ve gone from cab driver to software engineer to solo performer. What’s the throughline there? Is there any?

No, not really. It’s largely the unplanned, unfocused life, I guess is how I would put it.

Well, there’s certainly something to be said for that.

Yeah, I went back to school and just randomly picked Intro to Computing because it met at the right time, it met at the time that I needed a class. And I just thought “Well, whatever. Sounds good, sounds like something everyone should know.” And then it turned into something else.

You’ve had such an interesting life with so many distinctly different parts to it that you must have a lot of other stories to tell. Are you currently developing material for another show?

No, I’m not. I mean, I’ve taken another class with David and I came up with another little snippet from my past life, but I don’t know… It’s occurred to me that sometimes you only have one good story in your life and this might be it. So I’m perfectly willing to admit that, if that were the case. If I can’t come up with anything else I’m not really gonna force it. But you know, something else might pop up.

(photos by Cynthia Smalley)

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