Real emotion on stage

At long last, the curtain has come down on the most important chapter so far of Anthony Rapp’s life in the theater. Last week, he and the other original members of the cast of “Rent” took their final bow in a special 10th anniversary benefit performance in New York in memory of the hit musical’s late writer-director, Jonathan Larson.

For Rapp, the evening capped a year of encores that made his character’s signature black-and-white striped scarf a familiar sight among the show’s exuberant fans. He has been reliving Larson’s tragic tour de force about bohemian life on New York’s Lower East Side in last year’s coolly received film version, as well as his recent memoir, “Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Musical ‘Rent.’ ”

But the reunion had a special resonance for him. “It feels like a celebration and a completion,” Rapp says. “Like it brings it truly full circle.”

The 34-year-old actor created the role of video artist Mark Cohen a decade ago. The rock opera went on to win the Pulitzer Prize, and after 10 years on Broadway there’s no end in sight. Last fall, a film version was finally released, with Rapp reprising the role of Mark. Though the movie, directed by Chris Columbus, was generally slammed by critics and audiences, Rapp still savors that part of his life.

“I’d been in the business for so long and I knew how rare it was, what we were going through,” he says. “My cast mates were young, and they didn’t really know that that level of success was not the norm. I mean, it was really extraordinary.”

What’s less well known is that Rapp was undergoing another life-changing experience at the time, a private journey that became inextricably linked to his public performances. His mother was dying of adrenal cancer while he was singing about starving artists felled by AIDS. At one point, the stress of his impending loss became so unbearable that he assaulted his boyfriend during a fight outside the theater just before a performance in 1997. “I knew that this was the worst thing that I had ever done, the absolute worst, irreversible and horrible and shameful and awful and hateful and how would I ever recover from it?” he writes.

His first book, commissioned by editor Rob Weisbach, who’d experienced his own loss of a parent, has been generally warmly received by critics. “His prose can be clunky and overwrought, but his voice is unpretentious and unfailingly honest,” Melissa Rose Bernardo wrote in Entertainment Weekly. “A rare (and refreshing) occurrence in a showbiz memoir.”

At the moment, Rapp, who lives in New York with his boyfriend, actor Rodney To, is perched on a couch in his publicist’s office in West Hollywood. He appears delicate and pale, slightly built with reddish, short-cropped hair and blond eyelashes. Boyish and earnest, Rapp draws young women to public appearances in droves even though he’s quite public about being gay.

“Ninety-five percent of the people who come to my events are young women, and they absolutely know about me,” he says. “It’s not a mystery. I do know they don’t care.”

Exhilarating, harrowing

Rapp already had several film credits (“Dazed and Confused,” “Six Degrees of Separation”) when he found himself skating through chaotic traffic to the New York Theatre Workshop for his “Rent” audition, which is where the memoir opens. While the narrative takes readers along on the exhilarating ride toward creating a landmark musical, he also parses the cast’s horror at losing Larson to an aortic aneurysm at 35, only days before opening night. After describing the memorial service in which the cast came together to sing Larson’s music, Rapp writes that “as painful as this time had been, in some ways I had never felt more engaged with my life.”

He bristles at critics who ascribe the show’s success to sympathy generated by the tragedy of Larson’s untimely death. “It seemed like some of the critics who had it out for the movie had been waiting 10 years to weigh in on this phenomenon that they’d never dug,” Rapp says. “They just went after it, and some of their reviews made intimations that the only reason it was ever a success was that Jonathan died. It’s patently impossible to think that a show would be running for 10 years because the writer died. It’s such an absurd notion.”

Meanwhile, Rapp was also struggling with the long, difficult illness of his mother, Mary Lee Rapp, a registered nurse in Joliet, Ill., who had largely raised him, his brother Adam Rapp, a noted playwright-film director (“Stone Cold Dead Serious” and “Red Light Winter,” the latter a 2005 Pulitzer finalist in drama), and their sister, Anne, on her own after his parents divorced. After his mother’s death in May 1997, Rapp continued with the show until the following January, then returned for the touring productions in Chicago and London. “I know that I channeled it all into my performance,” he says. “And compounded with everything it made me that much more appreciative of the success of the show.”

But Rapp was also intent on writing about the unexpected reactions he experienced in dealing with so much loss in both his life and his art. A year after his mother’s death, he was hit hard by the memory during the London run of the show.

“I’d heard anniversaries are hard and I was doing OK, but then the floodgates opened,” he says. “I’d had a lot of emotional breakdowns in the time of all this. ‘Rent’ was so emotional anyway. But it was the first time that I really felt that it would never end. I was never going to be able to recover from it. It was like the abyss opened and I was falling and there was no bottom.”

Even though Rapp poured himself into the book fully without censoring his less noble ways of coping, his periods of self-absorption and anger, he muses that acting remains his creative comfort zone.

“Now that the book is out in the world, it’s very weird in a way because as an actor, the work is in my body,” he says. “It’s me. You’re looking at me doing the work, whereas the book is this object that will exist for as long as it’s in print, that people can hold in their hand. It’s of me, but it isn’t me. I feel separate from it in a way that I don’t as an actor even though I’m playing characters.”

What he’s drawn to

Since “Rent,” Rapp has appeared in small independent films, including “Scaring the Fish,” a drama set at a secluded lake that is about to hit the festival circuit. Another film, “Open House,” which was recently released on DVD, is closer to vintage Rapp, a bent musical in which he plays a real estate agent grappling with potential buyers who have sex at open houses and filch drugs from bathroom cabinets. He also plays a necrophiliac who works in a morgue in a musical called “Pretty Dead Girl,” which is being developed by the East Village Opera Company.

“I’m certainly drawn to things that are a little more unusual,” he says. “I’ve been in the business long enough now -- 25 years -- that it’s as much about the experience of making a piece as it is about anything that goes along with it. I’ve met too many actors who aren’t necessarily happy doing what they’re doing, but they get a good paycheck. I’d much rather be part of something I’d be happy to be a part of than cash in.”