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Synopsis:
If the US and Canada are Fire and Ice (Michael Adams), America and Cuba are fire and brimstone. Canadian actress and social activist Grace MacDonald fumes as she reviews a script from American Television Producer, Arthur Goldspike. The same day, her Cuban friend Dr. Lazara Ortega laSantos arrives from Havana to begin the Canadian leg of her international lecture tour. Goldspike is scheduled to arrive at Grace’s Toronto apartment soon there-after. According to his letter of introduction, dated November 3, 2004, Arthur is determined Grace will play the elder Laura Secord in a mangled TV version of the War of 1812-14, to air as Laura Secord Redux, in a Fox/Disney co-pro series called Repatriating America’s Lost Heroes. Goldspike’s Laura Secord regrets ratting on the Yanks, and wishes to redeem herself: she made a mistake. She ran the wrong way by accident. It would all have been so much simpler if North America was just the USA. Grace, mentored by Tommy Douglas, the father of Canadian Social Medicine, would be amused if she wasn’t so appalled. This American Goldspike is barking mad! Grace and Lazara (no stranger to American imperialism) begin to lay a strategy to repel this crude cultural invasion, halt the falsification of a Canadian icon and quash the 'Disney-fication' of Canada's history. Grace’s son, pharmaceutical executive Grant MacDonald, arrives with his American wife US State Department 9/11 claims attorney, the terror traumatized Nell Bradshaw-MacDonald. They are fleeing the USA. Grant has been charged with trading with the enemy... the enemy in this case being the children in Lazara’s care struggling for their lives while suffering the consequences of the US embargo at her oncological sanatorium in Tararà, just outside Havana. Themes of humanitarianism, world domination, liberal social democracy vs. conservative capitalist democracy, the reconstruction of Cuba by and for Cubans, and the very survival of The Canadian Enlightenment in this harsh post 9/11 climate, dominate the lives of these five characters. Excess careens among social comedy, agitprop and farce in this deadly serious examination of the contemporary Canadian experience. How strong is the true north? How long will she stay free? In Excess, Canada's future looks very promising indeed. |