<\/p>\n
Stage director Cameron Watson has one of the best batting averages in town.<\/p>\n
His productions of \u201cThe Sound Inside\u201d<\/a> at Pasadena Playhouse, \u201cOn the Other Hand, We\u2019re Happy\u201d<\/a> for Rogue Machine Theatre at the Matrix and \u201cTop Girls\u201d<\/a> at Antaeus Theatre Company were morale-boosting for a critic in the trenches, offering proof that serious, humane, highly intelligent and happily unorthodox drama was alive and well in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n Watson\u2019s appointment as artistic director of Los Feliz\u2019s Skylight Theatre Company starting Jan. 1 is good news for the city\u2019s theater ecology. Producing artistic director Gary Grossman, who led the company for 40 years with enormous integrity, built Skylight into an incubator of new work that embraces diversity and the local community.<\/p>\n Developing new plays is fraught with risk. Watson has the both the artistic acumen and audience sensitivity needed to usher Skylight through this perilous moment in the American theater when so many companies seem to be holding on by a thread.<\/p>\n Watson\u2019s production of \u201cHeisenberg,\u201d which closes Sunday at Skylight, showcases one of his signal strengths as a director: his ability to balance complicated emotional material with playful dramatic form. Simon Stephens\u2019 drama, presented at the Mark Taper Forum in 2017, is a two-hander that tests the validity of the uncertainty principle in the arena of human relationships.<\/p>\n Juls Hoover and Paul Eiding star in \u201cHeisenberg\u201d by Simon Stephens, directed by Cameron Watson at the Skylight Theatre. <\/p>\n (Jeff Lorch)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n German physicist Werner Heisenberg\u2019s great insight, from a theater critic\u2019s science-lite perspective, is that there are tradeoffs in what can be known. He was examining the related but distinct properties of speed and position. But Stephens is dealing with something even more complex \u2014 the emotional variables of love. In this case, it\u2019s the love between two unlikely people, Alex Priest (Paul Eiding), a London-based bachelor butcher in his mid-seventies, and Georgie (Juls Hoover), a manic fortysomething American woman who careens into his life like an unstoppable drone.<\/p>\n In the Broadway production from Manhattan Theatre Club that appeared at the Taper, Mary-Louise Parker (who starred opposite Denis Arndt) endowed Georgie with her signature raspy charm and eccentric wiles. The character, a compulsive talker whose social manner is as subtle as a leaf blower, poses a tremendous acting challenge, being as intensely annoying as she is mysteriously alluring. Alex falls in love with her, and the audience must be able to put up with her.<\/p>\n Hoover, unsteady in the early going, gets better as the production settles into a groove. But her raucous Georgie made me wonder why this solitary older gentleman was tolerating her intrusive madness.<\/p>\n Eiding\u2019s portrayal hints at a man awakening to his own loneliness. He\u2019s contending with something deeper than Georgie\u2019s suspicious and off-putting nature. He\u2019s reckoning with the old wounds and stark compromises that have left him isolated at the twilight of his life. <\/p>\n How does anyone wind up where they are? As Alex comes to learn, not being able to predict one\u2019s future position may be the secret to happiness. <\/p>\n This story of mature love survives not only the threat of Georgie\u2019s mercenary motives but also a shoestring production that is forced to make do with a drab set and a discrepancy in the level of performances. But the humanity of the play shines through like a light from a dwindling candle that refuses to give up its flame.<\/p>\n