SYNOPSIS:

PART 1 of 3: From Thomas Morton’s arrival in New England to his May Day Revels with Native people and planters in 1627. How does a witty Elizabethan outdoorsman and lawyer take care of six boys when they’re marooned on the frontier? How do they come to terms with Native American women and men devastated by plague, how do the tribes handle them? What longings for a home, friendships, romances and trade bring cooperative success in what Morton calls “paradise“? And, what will The Pilgrims of Plimoth Plantation do about this fast-rising rival, Merrymount? By May 1627, Morton’s many friends raise a Maypole to celebrate and grow their prosperity: the pageant also stages America’s first English poetry and drinking-song, to offer the country a new manifesto of love. It’s not Utopia — just mutual respect. And it’s working. PART 2: From Plimoth’s and Boston’s assaults on Merrymount to their Pequot War and The Battle of Mystic, 1637. Captain Myles Standish leads Plimoth’s slapstick campaign to foil Morton: they arrest, maroon and exile him, but he comes back full of scathing sense. As more Puritans found Salem and Boston, how do Morton’s boys and Native friends cope with change nobody wants? What happens when Boston hoists Morton like a cow onto a ship as the country’s first “political exile,” and chops down the Maypole to bring his boys and Native friends to heel? Who cooperates, who resists? As Morton wins his suit in court, the Puritan colonies move to crush both dissent and Native tribes in Morton‘s web. Ten years after the May Day Revels, The Pequot War explodes across this array of individuals, and Merrymount’s people need every trick to save themselves. Their best weapon: the Puritans’ own comic ineptitude. Any film can include an exploding fortress — history gives us a fortress melting in the rain. PART 3: From Morton’s final return, arrest and banishment to the secret survivals of his Native and English-planter friends. Beleaguered King Charles can’t enforce Morton’s legal victory: the English Civil War is near, and Morton (at 70) sails back to America. He still craves a home and family of his own and, hunting old friends, discovers what the Puritans have done (and what they think they’ve done) to his “paradise.” As the colonies clamp down, Merrymount’s friendships and romances, rivalries and hatreds reach good and bad resolutions. Boston reviles Morton as a traitor and mocker: they arrest and jail him through a brutal winter. But Morton, who taught others “to cherish a friend,“ discovers secret helpers in the colonies. At last he escapes to join surviving Native and English friends in Maine “wilderness.” There, Thomas Morton and his mixed American family find a place to build anew.