Review: In ‘Pamela Palmer,’ a Blonde, a Gumshoe and an Existential Mystery

This Pamela Palmer dame. Elegant blonde in powder blue and pearls. Nose way up in the air and legs way down to the ground. Lives in Connecticut in a house called Wishwood, with a rich husband in the study, two Degas ballerinas in the salon and an existential problem everywhere else.

The problem is: She doesn’t know what the problem is. She thinks she’s done something inexcusable but can’t remember what. Whenever she grabs a sliver of recall, it melts in her mind like déjà vu.

Same with “Pamela Palmer,” the play named for her, running through Aug. 10 at the Williamstown Theater Festival. It’s smart, elusive and trapped in its own construction.

The author being David Ives, creator of plots that can make you plotz, the construction is exceedingly clever. Seeking an explanation for her dread, Pamela (Tina Benko) begs a private detective, who goes by Jack Skelton, to pay a call at Wishwood. Jack (Clark Gregg) detects nothing, diagnosing Pamela as “a saint with memory issues.” In the process, he falls for her like a lead sinker on a flimsy line.

Indeed, “Pamela Palmer” abounds with flimsy lines, labored and unlikely, pulpy as overripe peaches.

“Name your price,” Pamela says. “I’ll pay it.”

“Isn’t pain what married people eat for breakfast?” Jack asks.

That’s all deliberate: Among the things Ives is playing with here are the clichés of the country house mystery, as filtered through film noir and his own restless intellect. Jack, despite his hard-bitten exterior and gumshoe patois, speaks French perfectly and name-checks T.S. Eliot — perhaps as payback for the play’s debt to Eliot’s “The Family Reunion.”