Summary
American Classic has really found its feet by now, and as the auditions for Our Town begin in earnest, the problems with casting real people — and all their attendant real problems — begin to emerge.
Richard Bean’s vision of his version of Our Town may have found a financier in American Classic, but he discovers a bigger problem in Episode 5. Casting the real people of Millersburg might have seemed like a masterstroke of budget authenticity at the time, but real people come with real problems, and those problems begin to become overwhelming as the auditions begin in earnest.
To recap: Richard accepted an undisclosed but presumably hefty sum of Connor’s money to cast his useless wife, Nadia, in the production. That’s where this episode finds him, with a series of mood boards laying out his grand vision for a modernized take on Our Town. But since he has already cast the roles from a pool of eccentric locals, he has to trust non-actors to bring that vision to life. And, since he doesn’t want anyone to know about his arrangement with Connor, he also has to pretend that he’s bankrolling the whole thing himself.
Dishonesty is very much a theme here. It isn’t all that surprising coming from Richard, I suppose, but I’m sure the chickens will nonetheless come home to roost at some point in the remaining two episodes. The problem is complicated by the fact that his ex-wife, Polly, shows up for dinner and puts him on the spot about the self-funding lie. He has to pretend he sold a portion of their art collection — that may or may not be attributable to Adolf Hitler, but that’s by the by — to drum up the dough. But Polly has more bombshells to reveal, including that she and Richard divorced because she didn’t want to play second fiddle. Kristen assumes she means to his career, but she’s really referring to her, the “great love of his life”.
Miranda is also pulling off a pretty significant deception. She got her college place, but she plans to reject it to instead move to New York and attempt to be an actor, an idea that Kristen is wildly against. Her only confidante, at least at first, is her boyfriend, Randall, who is utterly unserious and deeply immature and can’t stop behaving like a maniac out of jealousy when he spots a bit of a connection between Miranda and her on-stage husband, Heath. Miranda later comes clean about the college thing during the cast’s “circle of truth”, which also includes the brilliant recurring gag of Richard’s father once again coming out as a gay man as if for the very first time.
Richard immediately makes some calls, pulls some strings, and gets Miranda a job in New York, as well as offering her a place to live (with him). Miranda and Kristen argue about this later, after Randall jealously spills the beans about what she’s up to, and Richard really goes to bat for Miranda in a way that I think is quite endearing. And he’s right, I think. Kristen is trying to dissuade Miranda from pursuing her dream because her own dreams didn’t work out. And this dynamic is obviously complicated in an enjoyable way thanks to Polly’s earlier revelation, which is clearly still rattling around in Kristen’s head.
Naturally, American Classic Episode 5 ends with another couple of things going wrong. The first is that Jon, who has been thoroughly swayed by Connor’s pitch of opening a restaurant for him to run in his casino complex, gambles away Miranda’s entire college fund. And the second is that Nadia — who still can’t say “beat around the bush”, another great recurring gag — climbs into Richard’s room and tries to proposition him in the hopes of achieving some kind of artistic osmosis. Richard resists jumping into bed with her, but is forced to tell her that acting isn’t for her, which she unsurprisingly doesn’t take especially well. Given that Connor’s money is contingent on Nadia being in the play, and I’m fairly sure Richard has already spent the lion’s share of it, this could well be a bigger problem than a woman’s hurt feelings.
Still, at least Richard took the high ground. Sort of.
