A PRINCIPLED PRODUCTION

Simon Stephens’ deceptively simple romance finally reveals
its cosmic heart in close quarters at Skylight Theatre

Director Cameron Watson delivers a remarkably authentic and poignant tale with his production of Heisenberg, a short play based on a rather unremarkable human relationship story. What is remarkable is that this intimate outing, which opened last weekend at Skylight Theatre, soars on a level I never thought possible after seeing it on Broadway and at the Mark Taper Forum (also here in L.A.), where producers wrongly assumed that the purposely elusive title means the play should be presented on a cosmic level (the Taper went so far as to redesign its house). Here, the pared-down design, the astoundingly impactful acting, and British writer Simon Stephens’ strikingly unpredictable play add up to an experience that does indeed hint at the cosmic.

Stephens tells a more slender, muted tale here than in his ingenious The Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time: When a 40-something American woman Georgie Burns attracts Alex Priest, a wary, much-older, working-class Irish butcher, they set out to find what it is they need and desire in themselves, each other, and the world. As for the title of the play, named for renowned German physicist Werner Heisenberg, know going in that his Uncertainty Principle roughly states that the more precise the position of a particle is given, the less precisely one can determine what its momentum is. Head-spinning, right? Don’t worry — the play, unlike Stoppard’s Arcadia, is not about physics. The reference could be taken many different ways, but one interpretation could be that the more we get to know Georgie and Alex — our two central “particles” — the less certain anyone is what effect they’ll have on each other or where they will be going.

The first of six scenes has Georgie (Juls Hoover) embarrassingly apologizing to 75-year-old Alex (Paul Eiding) on a London train station deck. She has good reason to apologize: she just sneaked up behind him and kissed the stranger on the neck, mistaking him for her past lover. The intimacy of the moment unleashes an outpouring of emotion and story from Georgie to the empathetic Alex. Having spewed so much, the quirky (to put it politely) Georgie expects the same in return from the more-reserved Alex. Instead, she discovers her opposite, in many ways, in the man. The two provide compelling challenges to each other’s views on life and balance in their worlds.

Alex pays homage to the lost past by spending his free time taking long walks across London, falling into imagined conversations with his dead ten-year-old sister, and revisiting sites where he kissed the fiancée who jilted him more than fifty years before. His heartbreakingly predictable story is one of wasted potential and lost dreams — and here it would have ended, in grey London-town with Alex quietly raging, raging against the dying of the light, had he not fallen through happenstance into the stirring twists and turns of Georgie’s fiery, impulsive world.

At first, you may think that Hoover is overplaying the chaotic American grifter just a tad, with less subtext than might be called for (in the same role, Mary-Louise Parker was peculiar to the point of unbelievability). Hoover is simply being unusual in an attractive and interesting way. Rather than underscoring Georgie’s unexpected traits for emphasis, she nervously laughs and blurts out random thoughts as if such behaviors need no underlining at all, which allows her to personify Georgie as a force of imagination, not entirely sure herself what is truth and what is wishful thinking. In doing so, Hoover convinces us that Georgie’s behavior could spring from both sincerity and stark deception, especially as she commands the vast majority of dialog throughout the play.

As she rambles on, literally throwing herself into a relationship with a man 33 years her senior, we are left to ask why. Alex, too, is left to ask, exasperatingly: “Why are you talking to me?” Strategically, Georgie is the catalyst to Alex’s blossoming; she tracks him down at his stockless butcher shop with a barrage of questions and hopeful inquisitions, only to have Alex bravely withstand her verbal volleys while acknowledging privately that things could be a lot worse than having a young, attractive coquette flirt with him.

We suspect that Georgie wants something from Alex. After a romp in bed, she makes a request that is rightfully met with anxious distress. We are asked to consider: Is Georgie being deceitful? Is she a con artist or a lost soul? And why is Alex still listening to her and enduring this provocative relationship? What is in it for him and why? What does he have to gain — and in what manner should he react?

The two actors’ performances are intuitive and compelling, and make excellent use of the skinned essence of every relationship: putting two people together and watching what they bring out in each other. The resulting alchemy is palpable and endearing because Alex is a man of routine and reserve — someone who has lived safely inside his own boundaries for decades — and Eiding, with a multi-layered simplicity, reveals flashes of unexpected gallantry and a touch of the scholarly poet, suggesting through economical gestures (a tilt of the head, a gentle reach of his hand) that there is much more to this meager butcher than meets the eye. Indeed, I found myself magnetized with fascination at the way Eiding actively listened — this is how a master actor draws us in.

Heisenberg clearly offers older men renewed faith and optimism that perhaps it’s never too late to find companionship, even intimacy and possibly love. As Alex gains a fuller, more present life, Eiding makes the character’s spare, erudite comments count. Although Alex is hermetically sealed in his lonely bachelor’s existence, Eiding’s ability to make us believe in Alex’s wisdom, abundant patience, and generosity amount to a dramatic triumph. In fact, at the play’s end, I had that rare experience of desiring to watch Heisenberg again.

Tesshi Nakagawa’s minimalist set, with circular brushstrokes on the floor, serves well for allowing us to quickly jump through the six locations in the storyline. Ken Booth’s overhead lighting and Jeff Gardner’s ambient sound are most provocative during scene changes, as Watson instinctively understands that placing his actors in unmoving gentle floods of light keeps the attention on the performers. He keeps the pace going, guiding Hoover through Georgie’s formidable intensity and then countering her fieriness with intriguing subtler offerings by Eiding. The dynamic between the two is like repeatedly throwing magnets at each other, never knowing if they’ll repel or attach. As such, the story easily holds us through this 80-minute one act.

What the two thespians bring out in each other is much more than the sum of their parts. The acting is sublime in this simple yet elegant production — and, similar to Heisenberg’s theory, what results is profound and impossible to predict.

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photos by Jeff Lorch

Heisenberg
Brave Space Productions
The Skylight Theatre, 1816 1/2 N. Vermont Ave. in Los Feliz
Fri and Sat at 8; Sun at 2
ends on December 21, 2025
for tickets ($30-$40), visit Skylight

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