Heisenberg, Simon Stephens’s odd-couple romcom with philosophical underpinnings, now makes for a fascinating and ultimately quite moving ninety minutes of intimate theater in Los Feliz under Cameron Watson’s inspired direction.

 Juls Hoover plays American-abroad Georgie opposite Paul Eiding as Alex, the septuagenarian English butcher she accidentally (or perhaps not so accidentally) kisses on the back of the neck one evening at London’s St Pancras railway station, claiming somewhat improbably to have mistaken him for a recently deceased loved one.

Rather than beat an embarrassed retreat as might be expected, Georgie sticks around to offer Alex profanity-filled descriptions of her job (she’s “a fucking waitress” in Islington) and of a Southeast Asian honeymoon with a man who apparently looked a lot like Alex.

 And that would seem to be that, that is if Georgie didn’t show up at Alex’s butcher shop a few days later to let him know that every single thing she told him the first time round was a lie (“I do that thing quite often”), to quiz him about his job (Alex’s favorite thing about butchering is “the animals” and “the knives”), and to discover more about his dreary unmarried life (“I’ve never been on holiday, not since I was a child”).

Mostly, though, it’s Georgie who talks, leaving it to the taciturn Alex to try to distinguish fact from fantasy, not that this matters all that much when despite his cantankerous old self, he finds himself falling for a woman whose quirks make her hard to resist even at her most calculating.

Are these mismatched misfits made for each other or destined to go their separate ways?

The answer to this question remains an unknown quantity until Heisenberg’s final minutes, perhaps not unsurprisingly given the play’s title, a reference to German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s Principal Of Uncertainty, which posits that the more precisely one aspect of a particle (or in this case a person) is known, the less certain another becomes.

But even if you don’t know Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle from Laurence J. Peter’s Peter Principle, there is much in Stephens’s play to keep an audience intrigued.

As Georgie, Hoover has very much the kind of likable quirkiness that Mary Louise Parker brought to the role on Broadway and at the Mark Taper Forum along with a sense that you can never foresee what will pop out of Georgie’s mouth.

Opposite her, Antaeus Theatre regular Eiding does powerful work as a man about whom the phrase “still waters run deep” could have been coined, and if Georgie’s compulsion to lie keeps us guessing, so does Eiding’s Alex’s need to keep as much of himself hidden as possible.

Doubling as producers of the Skylight Theatre guest production, Eiding and Hoover have surrounded themselves with an all-around brilliant team, beginning with director Watson, who not only has Georgie and Alex figuratively circling each other in their romantic cat-and-mouse game but does so quite literally as well, each scene taking us further around the circle of Tesshi Nakagawa’s remarkably ingenious set.

Add to that the proven brilliance of lighting designer Ken Booth and sound designer Jeff Gardner, with costume designer Kate Bergh giving each character a single just-right outfit to wear (plus a few accessories), and you’ve got a production design every bit as topnotch as anything you’ll see at L.A.’s best membership companies.

Heisenberg is presented by Brave Space Productions, LLC. Letitia D. Chang is stage manager. David Elzer is publicist.

With only this weekend’s performances remaining in Heisenberg’s five-week run, time is of the essence in reserving tickets before Sunday’s closing. That this production is pretty much the only non-holiday-themed show in town may well be icing on the cake for those in search of something out of the ordinary at this (or any) time of the year.

Skylight Theatre, 1816 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles.
www.bravespaceproductions.com

–Steven Stanley
December 19, 2025
Photos: Jeff Lorch

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Tags: Los Angeles Theater Review, Simon Stephens, Skylight Theatre