The Pacific Theatre community is saddened by the loss of Michael Kopsa, who died at one o'clock last Sunday morning. He got a cancer diagnosis a couple years ago, ended up living much more life than the doctors or anyone else expected, but about two weeks ago he was admitted to hospice, and early on October 23rd he left us.
Michael was a huge presence, both onstage and off, filled with an appetite for life, an intensity, and a passionate engagement with people and things that made him a remarkable actor and an unforgettable friend. He painted in oils, he played blues harp, he was a skilled carpenter, an incredible father to his daughter Nora - he met her mom, the incomparable Lucia Frangione, at Pacific Theatre - and, of course, he was one of the most unforgettable actors to inhabit our stage.
I met Kopsa in the spring of 2001. ("Kopsa." Michael was one of the only people in my world I always referred to by his last name. Why on earth? I don't know. Almost like there was a mythic quality to the guy - as human as I knew he was.) Gina Chiarelli had told me there was an actor, new in town, who I had to meet, who might be good for Pacific Theatre. So he and I booked a lunch. It was a demanding, stretched-thin time at PT, though I can't remember why, and I was coming to terms with the likelihood that I couldn't afford the time to act in Hospitality Suite that fall, playing the biggest-personality-in-the-room Larry. (Kevin Spacey's character in the film version, The Big Kahuna.) Just before lunch that particular day I was working at the photocopier, by the office door. And I looked up to see this guy come around the corner and head down the hall toward me, and I thought, "Well, I won't be playing Larry this fall." Before he'd spoken a word.
Now, I will say that I would have been fine in that role. More than fine, I would have made a meal of it. But the only reason I feel compelled to put that out there is because once you saw Michael Kopsa inhabit the part, you couldn't imagine anyone else doing it. Kevin Spacey would hang his head if he'd seen Kopsa live that role, command the theatre, take his place among the best and most powerful actors in our city.
From that time on, I watched for ways to have him back on our stage, wedged in between his film, TV and voice work, and shows at other theatres. I very much wanted to act with him, and he was eager to work with director Morris Ertman and Hospitality Suite cast member Tom Pickett, so he ended up in a role he felt uneasy in, the jaded professor Christopher Riley in Shadowlands. I think he felt like a hefty man squeezed into an uncomfortably undersized tuxedo, and was always self-deprecating about his work in that show. Ha! The play opens with an extended talk on suffering by my character, C.S. Lewis, and night after night, Kopsa challenged and prodded and dismissed and counter-argued through the entire speech -- without saying a word. I imagined I was speaking to an audience of Oxford dons and students, but every word was really addressed to Riley, with his intensity of focus and sharp, skeptical mind. I didn't walk out on stage to deliver a speech; I entered a boxing ring, faced with a heavy-weight, and every word and phrase had to be sharp, forceful, precise, if it were to have any impact on that formidable adversary. Michael doesn't have to say anything to fill a room.
I know, it all sounds terribly blown up and fanciful. But that's what it can be like inside an actor's head, that's what fires a performance, and without fail Michael's own blaze lit that fire in his fellow actors. How many of us did our best work opposite that incendiary presence?
In an era when women have taken their rightful place in the world of theatre, Kopsa was an unmistakably male presence; his booming voice coming down the theatre stairs in the midst of a chaos of men's voices at an audition sparked the decision to stage a reading of Twelve Angry Men, in which he was of course magnificent The next spring he played three very different men in PT's production of The Woodsman. Again, the self-doubt: "I'm not a character actor, Ron. I only do one thing. Sure, the cop, but the other two guys? You need a chameleon." Morris and I talked him into it, and he brought it: the policeman, the social worker, and the brother, all full-blown, vivid, distinct. He could always deliver much, much more than he thought he was capable of.
A few days before PT's production of Playland opened, I went in to take archival photos of the show. The very first day of rehearsal, the table reading had been potent, just two actors and a script, Tom Pickett and Michael Kopsa in Athol Fugard's searing story of a confrontation in a broken-down midway on the edge of the South African plains as the end of apartheid approaches. It felt as though they could have stood up from the table, changed clothes, and opened the play that night, it was that powerful and fully realized. But two and a half weeks later, as I entered the theatre space with my cameras, director Anthony Ingram pulled me aside; "See if you can say something to Kopsa. He can't stand anything he's doing, and doesn't think we can open." Or something to that effect, dire and self-doubting.
Well, if you saw the show, you saw what I saw that day through the camera lens - both men were astonishing. I know I'm describing all these Kopsa performances in superlatives, but... Michael was always superlative. Bigger than life, but utterly true to life. Impassioned, vivid, forceful, gifted. Balanced with the deepest humility - a humility that too often tipped into self-doubt and self-deprecation, but kept him human and humane.
Kopsa played Satan himself, in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. Was ever the destroyer of our souls more charming, more winning, more charismatic? And funny! One day in rehearsal he made his big entrance wearing a dapper little Hitler moustache, his eyes lit up, daring anybody to laugh. And we did. He took it off, "Of course I'm not going to do that in the show," but the director insisted, and he kept it, and what a moment that was! Night after night. Audacious, inappropriate, hilarious, inspired - and he wasn't sure he should do it. I'm tempted to say that that one outrageous choice won him his Jessie, but it would diminish everything else. I have NEVER witnessed a scene more electrically charged, more true, more virtuosic, more heart-sickening and tragic, than when Michael Kopsa and Bob Frazer square off in Bathsheba's Bar and Grill, and a cold, calculating Satan claims the soul of the self-loathing Judas. I watched it from the wings every single night, and when the run was over, grieved that I would never see it again.
And now we face the reality that we will never see Michael again. At least, not on a stage. But I hold out a hope...
The reason Gina sent Michael my way, twenty-one years ago, was not only that he was the actor that he was, but also because that man was as hungry for God as he was for all of life. At university back East he had fallen in among the Jesuits, gotten involved in some drama things they did, and now that he had moved to the coast, his insatiable appetite and curiosity led to spiritual conversations with Gina. And then with me. And with so many others, over so many years.
There was a restlessness to Michael, an unsatisfied quality, that kept him searching and striving, rather than settling and being certain. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they shall be satisfied." I do expect I'll see Kopsa again. Maybe I can even talk him into another show. Maybe a reprise of that time he played Satan. I sure hope so. I bet all of heaven shows up to see it.
