Anthony Rapp, unbroken, takes a bow

A seasoned pro at 22, Anthony Rapp arrived at an audition in New York City in 1994 not knowing that it would forever alter his life.

He’d been acting and singing since he was six years old, and was cast at nine as The Little Prince in “The Prince and the Aviator,” a Broadway show that never opened. As a teenager he did “Six Degrees of Separation” on stage at Lincoln Center and on film.

Rapp was late to that audition and had madly rushed to get there. He had just come from a friend’s funeral. When they called him in, he sang R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion,” and despite flubbing some of the lyrics, received a callback. He nailed it, and got the part of the struggling documentary filmmaker Mark Cohen in a new rock musical called “Rent.”

Not only did “Rent” break new ground in the theater, it quickly broke the hearts of its young cast and production team. Jonathan Larson, its composer, lyricist and book writer, died of an aneurysm right before the final dress rehearsal. He was 35 years old.

Despite the tragedy, “Rent” opened and would make Broadway history. It was a stunning example of how you proceed even when the worst happens — as Samuel Beckett famously said, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Larson had written a rock opera, loosely based on “La Bohème,” about young artists and outcasts living and dying in New York City’s Lower East Side at the time of AIDS. It was real, it was gritty, it was moving, and the songs were brilliant. “Rent” attracted a whole new generation of audiences to the theater. The cast was multiracial and sexually diverse, including Rapp, who was openly queer. The actors were all young and ripe for stardom. Along with Rapp, they included Taye Diggs, Jesse L. Martin, Idina Menzel, Adam Pascal and Daphne Rubin-Vega.

“ ‘Rent’ is the story of people who persevere in the face of loss, who keep putting one foot in front of the other, who keep struggling and living even though those among us are dying,” Rapp says. “I felt very fortunate to have that vehicle for my grief for everything that was happening. We just were so lucky that we got to have a funeral in the show [when Angel, the trans character, dies of AIDS in the second act]. We could pour everything that was happening into our performance. The differences between our personal lives and the lives of our characters were paper thin.”

That was true for Rapp in many ways. During the run of the show, his mother was dying in Chicago, and he made frequent trips to visit her. After her death, he wrote a book, “Without You: A Memoir of Love, Loss and the Musical ‘Rent.’ ” “The story I’m telling is: you move through this, and you can come out on the other side,” Rapp says.

He’ll be playing at the Crown & Anchor in Provincetown on Saturday, singing songs from shows he’s done and shows he wishes he had done. He’ll be accompanied by the multi-instrumentalist Dan Weiss, who was a member of the original band of “Rent.”

In the years that followed “Rent,” Rapp continued to work in theater, movies and TV. On Broadway he did “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” and “If /Then.” He performed a one-man show with music based on his book, “Without You.” His film credits include “Twister,” “A Beautiful Mind” and the adaptation of “Rent.” He’s currently a regular cast member on “Star Trek: Discovery,” on CBS All Access, playing Lt. Paul Stamets, the first openly gay character of the franchise.

“It’s great to be part of something that’s making a difference,” Rapp says. “I’ve been a nerd since I was a kid — ‘Star Trek’ has been part of my core experience. I have to keep pinching myself that this has happened. It’s not the way I thought my life would go.”

At the age of 46, Rapp also never thought he would become a key figure in the #MeToo movement. He had told friends and family that he had been sexually assaulted by Kevin Spacey when he was 14 and Spacey was 26 and they were both working stage actors. But he had never spoken publicly about it.

“I had been reading all the stories about Harvey Weinstein, but it was Academy Award-winning actress Lupita Nyong’o’s op-ed piece in The New York Times,” in which she wrote about being sexually harassed by Weinstein as a student at Yale, that, Rapp says, “moved me to my core. It was like a bolt of lightning.”

He was aware that Spacey, like Weinstein, was an alleged serial offender. “It wasn’t just me,” Rapp says. “I’d known other stories about Kevin over the decades, and that’s when I knew I had to share this.”

The resulting scandal, which effectively ended Spacey’s career, has transformed Rapp’s life as well.

“One of the things I didn’t know until the process started of talking to [film reporter] Adam B. Vary on BuzzFeed” — which was how Rapp first went public — “was the legal definition of what happened to me. To hear Adam tell me that it was an assault on a minor was incredibly cathartic. That’s what happened to so many people in the wake of all this. We’re seeing these things that happened to us with new eyes, and we have a new language that allows us to deal with it in a whole new way. It’s changed me. There was an unearthing effect that’s been incredibly healing. There are so many ripple effects that can be so unconscious and so hidden from view. I think we’re going to feel the effects of this forever.”

What: Anthony Rapp, live in concert

When: 7 pm Saturday

Where: Crown & Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown

Admission: $35-$65 at onlyatthecrown.com

Season of love