The close, humid intensity of Tennessee Williams’s Deep South is re-routed to Toronto in Bryden MacDonald’s three-hander.

Aged and jaded queen Lyle seems hopelessly entangled in a relationship of co-dependency with misery guts Auto, many years his junior, when the unashamedly brash, vampish Jude falls into their lives.

Picked up at a bar by Auto, Jude is introduced as the unwelcome house guest, a younger model who seems intent on wrecking the existing relationship.

But rather than brooding along like Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, the play takes an unexpected and rather touching change of direction as each of the men begin to ask increasingly difficult questions of themselves.

Lyle, played with wonderfully inebriated melodrama by Lionel Walsh, is the Blanche of the piece. Deluded and sick, he spends much of the play spinning yarns about his past to Caleb McMullen’s Jude, who initially finds this sad old man a scream.

Over the course of the play, however, his feelings for both Auto and the unwell Lyle deepen and intensify, and this hasty turnaround was the play’s only real failing. Set over the course of just two days, these shifts would have seemed more convincing if the play had hinted at a longer time frame.