Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard’s brilliant and enigmatic Zona Pellucida is that rare gift to an audience: intelligently conceived and flawlessly executed, full of horror, tenderness and humour. Lawson and Pollard, who create and perform under the name 2boys.tv, don’t so much reinvent drag as restore it to its traditional roots, employing the medium to examine cultural history in an utterly fresh context. Drawing on mid-century Hollywood and high opera as the connective tissue — zona pellucida is the membrane that surrounds a human ovum — the boys present a tableau of scenes that riffs on the links between creativity and delusion, imagination and survival, power and deceit.

Lawson lip-synchs perfectly to clips of dialogue and song — many taken from writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve, as well as from his 1959 adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly, Last Summer  — while Pollard’s stunning film projection further extends the show’s otherworldly magic. Some of the scenes are as puzzling as they are exquisite, but the pleasures continue to unfold long after the show is over as the carefully layered associations surface like memories of a particularly vivid and charged dream.

Though not thematically or stylistically connected, Keith Cole’s The Needle Exchange keeps the party going with a brisk 30 minutes of improvised talk show fun. Cole, who hosted last year’s successful ArtHouse Cabaret in which 2boys.tv made their Toronto debut, playfully maintains a the-rules-are-there-are-no-rules atmosphere. He and local notables pack in as much song, dance and sparring as they can before the buzzer announces the half-hour is up.