Stage director Cameron Watson has one of the best batting averages in town.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. The humanity of the play shines through like a light from a dwindling candle that refuses to give up its flame.

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Watson, like Peter Brook before him, knows how to convert an empty space into a realm of magic and meaning. For Watson, the play’s the thing. But for the spark to happen, actors and audience members need a director as intuitively attuned to the uncertain human drama as Skylight Theatre Company’s new leader.

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                                                                                                              Charles McNulty