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

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Stage director Cameron Watson has one of the best batting averages in town.His productions of “The Sound Inside” at Pasadena Playhouse, “On the Other Hand, We’re Happy” for Rogue Machine Theatre at the Matrix and “Top Girls” 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.Watson’s appointment as artistic director of Los Feliz’s Skylight Theatre Company starting Jan.1 is good news for the city’s 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.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.Watson’s production of “Heisenberg,” 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’ 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.German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s great insight, from a theater critic’s 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 — the emotional variables of love.In this case, it’s 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 forty...