Toronto, early 90’s. Frank is young, gifted and brilliant (or so he thinks). Terminally brilliant. He’s a budding thespian who’s having trouble getting started. It’s bad enough that he’s quit a General Arts degree for a gap year, dipping his toe into community theatre, only just starting acting classes, and making a paltry salary at his part time data entry job. His fling with Lucas has morphed into friendship and roommate status. It’s pre-internet, and encounters take more work, with ads in newspapers, on phone lines, and at the bars and the baths. HIV looms constantly as a fearsome threat. It’s all Frank can do to figure things out before his part-time approach to love and sex threatens his life, or a similar laissez-faire way with his life’s purpose takes him down a road to no career whatsoever, on stage or off.

One of the jobs Frank lucks into is teaching Drama at a church seniors centre. It’s not the answer to everything, but as Frank opens his elder students’ perceptions with the larger vista of the theatre, his own world, and that of his equally (terminally) brilliant artist friend Mandy, unexpectedly expands due to the life experience of his students. 

Questions simmer. Why is Mandy so helpful in documenting Frank’s Seniors Drama Class Scene Night but so unreliable with recording Frank’s own acting as he tries to pin down an agent? Ahy is her career seemingly taking off after a throwaway introduction by Frank to Felix in his Drama class, a former home decor designer who paints nudes? Is one of the seniors confiding in Frank a sign of his true calling, or is it a little too personal and close to home? Why is it a mixed blessing when Frank does manage to land an acting agent?

As if Stephen McCauley had penned a Toronto Tales of the City, Terminally Brilliant is filled with specifics of the town and the era, as a late twentieth century coming of age saga, a tribute to aging, and an homage to a bygone time of queer struggle, with reverberations for the current century.