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. Georgie Porgie, first produced on November 20, 1968, is another play of vignettes, illustrating the destructive force of self-hatred in gay men. The Village Voice wrote: "Birimisa's dialogue is graceful and pointed, his characterization swift and penetrating, and astonishingly, his most agonizing scenes are often his most hilarious, as if he's able to reach greater heights of pain and laughter by having the two lean on each other... Birimisa's considerable talent [is] as fluid as it is raw, as passionate as it is brutal." The Best Plays of 1968–1969 listed Georgie Porgie as a highlight of the Off-Off-Broadway season. Contemporary Authors quotes a review in Variety calling Georgie Porgie "'an advance in its field, and unlike many of its stage predecessors (Boys in the Band and Foreplay, to pick two), Birimisa's play minces few images