They say the only sure things in life are death and taxes. Add the Off-Broadway stalwart Perfect Crime to the list. On Saturday, April 18, New York City’s longest-running play EVER celebrates its historic 22nd Anniversary and 9000th performance. And Catherine Russell, the show’s leading lady since its premiere in 1987, will receive a citation from The Guinness Book of World Records as “The Most Performances by a Theater Actor in a Role,” far surpassing such legends as Carol Channing (over 5000 performances in Hello, Dolly!) and Yul Brenner (4626 times in The King and I).

“Yul Brenner, really?” she asks incredulously Dressed in a smart black and white suit, you’d never guess that she dealt with a mild disaster hours before. “Our cooler exploded… Broken Snapple bottles everywhere,” she explains, “so our press rep, treasurer and I had to clean that up. I was wearing overalls and boots.”

Not only does Russell tread the boards eight times a week (having missed only 4 performances in the past 22 years) as the brilliant psychiatrist Margaret Thorne Brent, she is also the general manager of the Snapple Theatre Center, which also houses The Fantasticks, which she co-produces, Russell tends to all matters at the complex, running up and down ladders constantly, and is as handy with a nail gun as she is with her prop revolver gun. She has even been known to rescue those who ignore the elevator’s stern warning: “No more than six people.”   She toils at the Snapple Center for roughly 96 hours every week, from 9 AM to 11 PM daily, and also teaches Acting at New York University and English at Baruch College.

In April 1987, President Ronald Reagan was dealing with the fallout of the Iran-Contra affair, Oliver Stone’s Platoon just won the Oscar for Best Picture, the Berlin Wall still stood, and the Actors Collective, a scrappy downtown theatre troupe, premiered artistic director Warren Manzi’s thriller Perfect Crime for a 16-performance run at the now-defunct Courtyard Playhouse on Grove Street. The show was picked up by a commercial producer who moved the production from venue to venue like a gypsy camp, and Manzi continued to tinker with his play even seven years into the run. “He would give us act two rewrites during intermission,” Russell recalls. “I call it kamikaze acting!” In 1994 the show settled into a former Times Square burlesque house rechristened the Duffy Theatre, and since 2005 has been comfortably ensconced in the Snapple Theatre Center.

Since its premiere, the show has been seen by 1.5 million theatre-goers, 80,478 onstage gunshots have been fired, 4,862 prop coffee cakes have been consumed, hundreds of actors have been employed by the show and Catherine Russell has spent the equivalent of two years of her life onstage – over 16,000 hours! After all that time, she still finds new aspects of her character to play. She attends other theatre as often as possible, and is constantly inspired by the brilliant performances she sees.

Russell attributes much of the show’s longevity to the evergreen popularity of the murder mystery genre, evident in the multiple editions of television’s “Law & Order” and “CSI” franchises, as well as London’s long-running theatrical champ, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, which has been running since 1952.

What does the future hold for Catherine Russell and Perfect Crime? Will she still be running the Off-Broadway institution 22 years from now? She emits a great throaty laugh and says “I’ll be 75 then, so I certainly hope not!”