Interviewing the Rapp brothers is like a crash course in family counseling. Their growing up is a story of poverty, sibling discord, struggling single parenthood, death, reconciliation and now, finally, big dreams coming true.
It’s also a tale of two talented, sensitive young men with separate but promising careers in the arts. Anthony Rapp created the lead role in “Rent” in New York and is now starring in our area in the title role of the Broadway-bound revival of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.” Adam Rapp’s second novel, “The Buffalo Tree,” is now out in paperback from HarperCollins; his plays have been read in workshops at Steppenwolf Theatre and the New York Public Theatre; and he currently has a new play, “Ghosts in the Cottonwoods,” in production in a studio space at Victory Gardens Theater.
Anthony is 27, and Adam, who published his first novel at age 24, is now 30.
But their achievements come after a somewhat Gothic upbringing in Joliet, a life that swung dramatically between poverty and show biz after Anthony the child actor started landing roles in big touring musicals.
Anthony became the family breadwinner; Adam was a shoplifter who did time in reform school. Their divorced mom tried to balance Anthony’s success and raise the two boys and a girl, Ann.
At 9, Anthony made his Broadway debut in a musical version of “The Little Prince,” which closed quickly; the family found itself living on Staten Island with no refrigerator and no heat. “There was talk of having me sing on the Staten Island ferry to earn some money,” Anthony recalls.
Adam went from reform school to a military school before getting his act together in college. But when he graduated and journeyed to join Anthony in New York, ready to reconcile and build on their mutual interest in the arts, he walked in one day to find his baby brother with a male lover. That’s how Adam learned Anthony was gay.
“I turned around, went into the other room and stared at the wall for five solid hours,” Adam recalls. “I was really homophobic.” They got through that (eventually collaborating on a short story about two brothers, one straight, one gay), and then Anthony took off in the role of Mark in the wildly popular “Rent,” bringing an instant media fame Adam found difficult to accept.
Then their mother came down with cancer and, after a three-year struggle, died last year.
“She and I talked a lot about everything before she died,” says Anthony. “I don’t think there was anything calculated or malicious, but I do think she realized she didn’t handle some things very well, especially in regard to Adam and Ann,” the family’s middle child. “Traveling with me and leaving them behind didn’t help her relationships with them. I sometimes felt the bulk of that.”
Their mother, Mary, had divorced their father when Anthony was 2. She then worked as a nurse in Joliet. Anthony got into acting at 6, when he did some plays at a summer camp where his mom served as a nurse.
“I did community theater after that, and people told her to take me to Chicago for auditions,” he recalls. “She wasn’t really a stage mom, just incredibly supportive. This was all something I initiated. The first moment I walked onto a stage, I was home.”
While in grade school, Anthony was cast in “Evita” at the Shubert Theatre here in Chicago. Then came “The Little Prince,” and Anthony’s job touring with Yul Brynner in “The King and I.” He was in both the Broadway and film versions of “Six Degrees of Separation” and later, as a teenager, won roles in the movies “Adventures in Babysitting,” “School Ties” and “Dazed and Confused.”
His upbringing brought him some incredible highs and lows: “It was so exciting to go to New York and depressing to come back to Joliet,” he says. “Especially by 15, I wanted to break out.” It was even more depressing for Adam: “Here he was, basically making the money for the family, and he would go off, and then come home, and sometimes my sister and I would go with them, and sometimes we wouldn’t. It was as if we were in different economic classes. He’d come home with toys, and I would be toyless. I think I actually despised the theater for a long time.”
And there was the difference in lifestyle. “I was a jock and into basketball,” says Adam, who is 6 foot 3. “Most of my friends’ little brothers followed them around the basketball court. Anthony was at home playing show tunes.”
“He and his friends,” Anthony remembers, “would hang out at the house and make fun of me.”
When Adam was 11, he spent time in a reform school — “a nightmare,” he now remembers, and which became the inspiration for “Buffalo Tree,” a moody, poetic work for young adults about a youngster in just such a setting. But Adam was also smart, and his grades won him a scholarship to a military school outside Milwaukee, where he wound up an athlete and the class salutatorian. He went to Clark College in Dubuque, Iowa, expecting to study medicine. Instead, he wound up taking fiction courses.
When he went to New York after graduation, it seemed the two brothers’ lives had a meeting ground at last. But first came the rift over Anthony’s homosexuality, which Adam partly overcame by developing some gay friends himself. Then came “Rent.”
“It was fine at first, but things got so intense,” Adam says. “He turned into a tornado. I don’t blame him, but it was just hard to connect. When I first came to New York, he was directing these little gritty productions of plays, things that I respected. It isn’t that with `Rent’ he chose to abandon art or anything, but his career suddenly turned into this huge thing, and I watched how that infects someone’s life.
“And then our mother became sick, and that was difficult for both of us. We just disconnected.”
“For me, the best thing about `Rent’ is that it started in such a pure fashion,” Anthony says. “I never felt the success or fame was corrupting, because those of us involved had been involved from the beginning, with the original 1994 workshop. I felt we earned it, and after (author) Jonathan (Larson) died suddenly just before opening, we worked hard. For a show that’s so intense, none of us missed a performance for the first six months. I felt guilty about my mom, but when I’d come to visit, she’s insist I go back.”
“I came back here and spent 3 1/2 months,” says Adam. “I quit my job and came to live with her. There were a lot of unresolved things between us, but we resolved them. Good things were happening to me too.” During his mother’s illness, for instance, two of his plays were selected for staged readings at the prestigious playwrights’ conference at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn.
“I’d always felt like the black sheep,” he says, “something I’m sure will be with me for the rest of my life.”
They’re back in the Chicago area together now by coincidence. Rivendell Theatre Ensemble is producing Adam’s play through Dec. 19, and “Charlie Brown,” a project led by Chicago-based commercial producer Michael Leavitt, is on tryout through Nov. 28 at the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts in Skokie. But even in a one-hour interview, you sense they’ve reconciled their differences, that now they enjoy a tender, supportive understanding of each other’s pursuits and a deepening love.
Despite their unorthodox upbringing, the brothers defend their mother. “She wanted to be a writer herself; she kept a journal while she was ill, but she’d had a rough upbringing,” says Anthony. “Her mother kept her from doing what she wanted, and she vowed she’d never stand in her children’s way.”
“And it was nice for her, what was happening to Anthony when he was little,” Adam says. “She was only earning $14,000 my first year of college in 1987. With him, she got to stay in nice hotels. I don’t think she’d ever experienced anything remotely glamorous.”
Though ill, she managed to attend the Broadway opening of “Rent.” Adam’s editor sent her the first press copy of his novel, and she lived to see her daughter’s first child. Anthony says, “It was as if she had this elemental energy to see all of us do what we could do and be OK.”
They get along well with their father, who lives in a north suburb, they say, but the two brothers credit their mother for what they’ve accomplished. They’re proud of their sister too.
“She’s a mom,” says Adam.
“She’s an incredible mom,” says Anthony.
