Joanne Gordon to lead Cal Rep

California Repertory Company, the professional theater company based at Cal State Long Beach, is no longer the Howard Burman Repertory Company.

Burman, the company’s founding artistic producing director, has left Long Beach after 16 years in which Cal Rep became known for producing Burman’s own plays and adaptations as much as for anything else.

The new interim leader is Joanne Gordon, a longtime director with the company who hopes to take over permanently. She will lead the group at least through the 2005-06 season, she says. At the end of the 2004-05 season, the company’s artists will decide whether to conduct a search for a new permanent leader.

Gordon says she hopes to expand the company’s talent pool much further beyond the university than Burman did and to steer it toward more American work in contrast to the European work that Burman championed. She plans to focus on highly theatrical, nonrealistic work -- which Burman often did as well. “I hope we grow the young Robert Wilsons of the future,” she says.

Gordon emigrated from South Africa to the United States in 1979 and has written one book about Stephen Sondheim and edited another. She’s also taking Burman’s place on an interim basis as head of the university’s theater department.

Shashin Desai, artistic director of International City Theatre, Long Beach’s biggest theater company, last week commended Burman for bringing Cal Rep off the campus to the downtown Edison Theatre, where it now presents all its productions. But he said that “many, many people felt the theater had only one point of view” under Burman because he so often programmed his own work.

Burman, who has retired in Santa Cruz, could not be reached for comment.

-- Don Shirley