Director Cameron Watson, the newly named leader of Skylight Theatre Company, brings the human touch

Stage manager Cameron Watson has 1 of the champion batting averages successful town.

His productions of “The Sound Inside” astatine Pasadena Playhouse, “On the Other Hand, We’re Happy” for Rogue Machine Theatre astatine the Matrix and “Top Girls” astatine Antaeus Theatre Company were morale-boosting for a professional successful the trenches, offering impervious that serious, humane, highly intelligent and happily unorthodox play was live and good successful Los Angeles.

Watson’s assignment arsenic creator manager of Los Feliz’s Skylight Theatre Company starting Jan. 1 is bully quality for the city’s theatre ecology. Producing creator manager Gary Grossman, who led the institution for 40 years with tremendous integrity, built Skylight into an incubator of caller enactment that embraces diverseness and the section community.

Developing caller plays is fraught with risk. Watson has the some the creator acumen and assemblage sensitivity needed to usher Skylight done this perilous infinitesimal successful the American theatre erstwhile truthful galore companies look to beryllium holding connected by a thread.

Watson’s accumulation of “Heisenberg,” which closes Sunday astatine Skylight, showcases 1 of his awesome strengths arsenic a director: his quality to equilibrium analyzable affectional worldly with playful melodramatic form. Simon Stephens’ drama, presented astatine the Mark Taper Forum successful 2017, is simply a two-hander that tests the validity of the uncertainty rule successful the arena of quality relationships.

Juls Hoover and Paul Eiding prima successful “Heisenberg” by Simon Stephens, directed by Cameron Watson astatine the Skylight Theatre.

(Jeff Lorch)

German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s large insight, from a theatre critic’s science-lite perspective, is that determination are tradeoffs successful what tin beryllium known. He was examining the related but chiseled properties of velocity and position. But Stephens is dealing with thing adjacent much analyzable — the affectional variables of love. In this case, it’s the emotion betwixt 2 improbable people, Alex Priest (Paul Eiding), a London-based bachelor butcher successful his mid-seventies, and Georgie (Juls Hoover), a manic fortysomething American pistillate who careens into his beingness similar an unstoppable drone.

In the Broadway accumulation from Manhattan Theatre Club that appeared astatine the Taper, Mary-Louise Parker (who starred other Denis Arndt) endowed Georgie with her signature raspy charm and eccentric wiles. The character, a compulsive talker whose societal mode is arsenic subtle arsenic a leafage blower, poses a tremendous acting challenge, being arsenic intensely annoying arsenic she is mysteriously alluring. Alex falls successful emotion with her, and the assemblage indispensable beryllium capable to enactment up with her.

Hoover, unsteady successful the aboriginal going, gets amended arsenic the accumulation settles into a groove. But her raucous Georgie made maine wonderment wherefore this solitary older man was tolerating her intrusive madness.

Eiding’s portrayal hints astatine a antheral awakening to his ain loneliness. He’s contending with thing deeper than Georgie’s suspicious and off-putting nature. He’s reckoning with the aged wounds and stark compromises that person near him isolated astatine the twilight of his life.

How does anyone upwind up wherever they are? As Alex comes to learn, not being capable to foretell one’s aboriginal presumption whitethorn beryllium the concealed to happiness.

This communicative of mature emotion survives not lone the menace of Georgie’s mercenary motives but besides a shoestring accumulation that is forced to marque bash with a drab acceptable and a discrepancy successful the level of performances. But the humanity of the play shines done similar a airy from a dwindling candle that refuses to springiness up its flame.

Watson, similar Peter Brook earlier him, knows however to person an bare abstraction into a realm of magic and meaning. For Watson, the play’s the thing. But for the spark to happen, actors and assemblage members request a manager arsenic intuitively attuned to the uncertain quality play arsenic Skylight Theatre Company’s caller leader.