Pamela Palmer by David Ives

World Premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival

By: Charles Giuliano - Jul 27, 2024

 

Pamela Palmer
By David Ives
Directed by Walter Bobbie
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Center Stage
July 23 to August 10, 2024
Scenic Design, Alexander Woodward
Costumes, Amanda Roberge
Lighting, Landon K. Elder
Composition/ sound design, Don Moses Schreier
Cast: Tina Benko (Pamela Palmer), Clark Gregg (The Detective), Max Gordon Moore (The Husband), Becky Ann Baker (The Mother).

In a scaled back Williamstown Theatre Festival season, a world premiere by the renowned playwright, David Ives, was a much anticipated highlight. It is presented on the intimate black box Center Stage which has rarely been used for WTF productions.

There is a full schedule of cabaret and one-nighters but just three productions, two standup comics, and Ives have been open for review.  From August 1 through 4 “WTF Is Next,” a festival within a festival, provides a sampler of what audiences may anticipate. The venerable theater festival has undertaken an extensive self- examination toward the goal of a total makeover.

On a thrust stage presented as the posh living room of a Connecticut mansion (designed by Alexander Woodward) Ives has written a wordy, noirish, ninety-minute, one-act play. The characters perform, under an enormous, out of scale chandelier that later makes a plot point.

Pamela Palmer revolves around the class struggle, social status, old and new money. Presiding over this upscale mansion, the mistress of the house, is from humble origin in Akron, Ohio. While she (Tina Benko) conveys a suitably autocratic demeanor her roots are showing.

She has engaged a detective (Clark Gregg) to investigate a conviction that she has done something terribly wrong. But beyond that malaise she can offer nothing more concrete. With such a vague concern just where to begin and how to respond to his probing questions? What is the difference between sin, a likely peccadillo, and a crime? For sin, confess to a priest, for crime, hire a detective.

The director, Walter Bobbie, is not particularly helpful in setting us on the right path to solve this dilemma. The PI’s rough demeanor and plain speech sets him in the spectrum of all those iconic sleuths from Humphrey Bogart, to Robert Mitchum and John Garfield.  But Gregg has not a smidgeon of that uniquely noir panache.

Amanda Roberge has dressed him as disheveled and déclassé in tattered leather jacket and an outré polo shirt. Pamela is attired in a well tailored, powder blue dress with a string of pearls. There is a soiled and torn other version of the costume but it would be a spoiler to say why.

Ives strives to make the implausible credible. He would have us believe that she has fallen head-over-heels for the numbingly ordinary PI. This is all the more difficult to accept given his stilted, monolithic performance. Lacking any gestures he literally keeps his hands in his pockets. Where was the director to break him of that habit?

Benko, on the other hand, conveys Pamela with a full arsenal of theatrical techniques from wide eyed facial expressions to sweeping gestures. The Detective is outmatched and overplayed in a futile attempt to keep up with her seductive propensities. She is a privileged woman used to getting what she wants.

The notion of social imbalance is further advanced with the arrival of her husband (Max Gordon Moore) who conveys the status of old money. His delivery seems straight out of BBC casting. An international banker he appears to be away more than at home. The point is made that they have occasional sex but there is no hint of love in this upscale marriage. During time when home alone she reads detective novels.

In fact she recruited the investigator based on a case that was widely covered in the media. That was the jumping off point.

The arrival of The Mother (Becky Ann Baker) brings us to some semblance of reality. She is wonderfully down to earth with none of the social pretense of her daughter. While she brings sanity and balance we learn that she suffers terminal cancer. So she is short of the lifeline needed to pull Pamela out of her self-inflicted quagmire.

There is an improbable meeting between the Detective and Husband. The drift is that he will move in (shack up) to keep an eye on Pamela while he is away.

There is a violent confrontation between husband and wife before he departs for yet another business trip.

Without spoilers let’s say that there is a reversal. Ives advances the plot from the improbable to the impossible. Pushed a bit further this might work as a witty class comedy.  There is much to improve upon.