George Birimisa (February 21, 1924 – May 10, 2012) was an American playwright, actor, and theater director who contributed to gay theater during the 1960s, the early years of the Off-Off-Broadway movement.
His works feature sexually explicit, emotionally charged depictions of working-class homosexual men, often closeted, in the years before the 1969 Stonewall riots prompted the gay rights movement. Contemporary Authors stated that "Birmisa's plays feature themes of human isolation, frustrated idealism, and rage against needless suffering, usually centered around homosexual characters." According to theatre critic and playwright Michael Smith, Birimisa's writing "links the pain of human isolation to economic and social roots." Birimisa remained an active playwright, author, editor, and teacher until the end of his life.
Early life and career
Birimisa was born in Santa Cruz, California, one of five children born to Croatian Americans Charles and Anna (Gjurovich) Birimisa. While George was still a child, his father died as the result of injuries while under arrest after speaking in support of the Communist Party at a labor rally.
Birimisa's mother remarried, but his stepfather rejected George and his two older brothers. He spent most of his childhood in a Catholic orphanage (St. Francis Catholic School for Boys) then in a series of foster homes. He left school after ninth grade. Birimisa married Nancy Linden in 1952, and they divorced in 1961.
After serving in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II, Birimisa supported himself with a series of jobs, including factory worker, bartender, disc jockey, health club manager, television network page, prostitute, and Howard Johnson's counterman. While working at Howard Johnson's on Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village, he once refused service to Walter Winchell when Winchell arrived after closing. In retaliation, the journalist ran a column calling the restaurant a hangout for "vag-lewd" (slang for homosexual) types. This publicity turned that branch of Howard Johnson's into a popular destination for gay men. The incident convinced Birimisa, who had begun writing fictional accounts of his life, to start writing honestly about his sexuality. He started writing plays at the age 41 while studying acting with Uta Hagen at the Herbert Berghof Studio.
Playwriting career
New York City
Birimisa's first play, Degrees, was produced at Theatre Genesis in the East Village of Manhattan in February 1966. The play portrayed a gay relationship; at the time, gay plays were not receiving critical attention. "For years," the playwright recalls, "even gay people would ask me, 'When are you going to write your first real play?'" Degrees included autobiographical elements, which would become more explicit in his later work. Birimisa wrote, "I don't agree that there are 'shades of truth'. We all know the truth, deep inside ourselves. As artists, we have a responsibility to reveal who we truly are, not to work in shades of gray. This truth includes our sexual beings."
Birimisa directed and acted in his best-known play, Daddy Violet, a semi-improvised indictment of the Vietnam War, in 1967. The play opened at the Troupe Theatre Club and at Caffe Cino, Joe Cino's coffeehouse that is generally acknowledged as the birthplace of the Off-Off-Broadway movement. The play subsequently toured colleges in the United States and Canada and appeared at the 1968 International Theater Festival in Vancouver. Birimisa acknowledged that he wrote Daddy Violet as a parody of the improvisational theater that was prominent at the time in an attempt to "out avant-garde everyone else." Birimisa revised the script to refer to the war in Iraq for a revival at the Boston Conservatory in 2006.
In 1969, Birimisa became the first openly gay playwright to receive a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. This enabled him to attend rehearsals for the London production of his first two-act play, Mr. Jello, in April 1968. Mr. Jello is an arrangement of realistic vignettes that intersect to form a surrealistic social statement, with characters including a female impersonator, a gay married man, and a hustler. Mr. Jello was later produced at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in 1974.