GEORGE BIRIMISA born
(d: 2012) an American playwright, actor and director who contributed to
the explosion of gay theater in the mid-1960s during the early years of
Off-Off-Broadway. His works feature sexually explicit, emotionally
charged depictions of working class Gay men, often closeted, in the
years before the Stonewall uprising (1969) triggered a national and
international Gay Rights movement. Contemporary Authors said that
"Birmisa's plays feature themes of human isolation, frustrated idealism,
and rage against needless suffering, usually centered around homosexual
characters.“ According to critic and playwright Michael Smith,
Birimisa's writing “links the pain of human isolation to economic and
social roots.”
Birimisa’s first produced play, Degrees (February 1966),[1] a
portrait of a Gay relationship, premiered at Theater Genesis in the
East Village, Manhattan. At the time, gay plays usually received no
serious artistic or 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 became stronger and more explicit in
Birimisa's later works. Above all, he writes out of a need to tell the
truth about his own life. "I don't agree that there are ‘shades of
truth,’” he says. “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 Off-Off-Broadway play, Daddy Violet[12] (1967), a semi-improvised indictment of the Vietnam War. Daddy Violet opened
at the Troupe Theatre Club, premiered in June 1967 at the Caffe Cino,
Joe Cino’s's famous coffeehouse in Greenwich Village that is generally
acknowledged as the birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway. The play
subsequently toured colleges in the United States and Canada and
appeared at the 1968 International Theater Festival in Vancouver. Today,
the playwright acknowledges that he wrote Daddy Violet as a
parody of the abstract,improvisational theater then in vogue
Off-Off-Broadway, an attempt to “out avant-garde everyone else.” For a
revival at the Boston Conservatory in 2006, Birimisa revised the script
to refer to the war in Iraq.
In 1969, Birimisa
became the first out 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 (April 1968), an
arrangement of realistic vignettes that intersect to form a
surrealistic social statement, with characters that include a female
impersonator, a Gay married man, and a hustler.
In 1976, Birimisa moved to Los Angeles, California. He dismisses the three plays he wrote there, A Dress Made of Diamonds (1976), Pogey Bait (1976), and A Rainbow in the Night (1978) as inferior to his earlier works. However, A Rainbow in the Night, an autobiographical portrait of two Gay men living in New York City’s Bowery in 1953, won a 1978 Drama-Logue Award, and Pogey Bait,
a comedy based on Birimisa’s wartime experiences as a gay apprentice
seaman, received subsequent productions in Minneapolis, San Francisco,
New York, and Los Angeles.
Birimisa moved to San Francisco in 1980 and did not write another play for almost 10 years. Then he began a revised version of A Rainbow in the Night titled The Man With Straight Hair (1994), which premiered at the Studio at Theater Rhinocerous. A one-man play, Looking for Mr. America (1995),
debuted at Josie’s Cabaret and Juice Joint and subsequently played in
New York at the La MamaExperimental Theater Club. Birimisa himself
performed the show at age 71, in the role of a man recounting his
lifelong sexual addiction. Dean Goodman's review noted that the play
offers “an eloquent and touching portrait of a particular gay man’s
journey through the last half of the 20th century.” Viagra Falls (2005)
received a concert performance at La MaMa E.T.C. on September 17, 2007,
under the direction of Daniel Haben Clark. The play chronicles a young
gay man's long-term sado-masochistic relationship with a closeted
opthamologist.
With Steve Susoyev, Birimisa edited Return to Caffe Cino (2007),
an anthology of essays and plays by writers associated with the
Cino. The book won a 2007bda Literary Award for theater and drama.
Birimisa: Portraits, Plays, Perversions (2009),
an anthology of collected works and essays about Birimisa's personal
life and career, includes an un-produced screenplay, The Kewpie-Doll Kiss,
which chronicles Birimisa's childhood loss of his father, abandonment
by his mother, and discovery of his sexuality, subjects explored earlier
onstage in A Dress Made of Diamonds.
George Birmisa
taught Creative Writing since 1983, sponsored by New Leaf Services. He
received the 2004 Harry Hay Award in recognition of his writing and
community service. He was writing an autobiography titled Wildflowers.
His unpublished manuscripts are in the Joe Cino Memorial Library at
Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts in New York.
