Volume 6, Issue 34: One Battle After Another

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On April 18, 1987, Ronald Reagan was wrapping up his final term as President, the No. 1 song in the country was “I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)” by Aretha Franklin and George Michael, the highest-grossing movie was The Secret of My Success starring Michael J. Fox, TV’s Alex P. Keaton, and Michael Jordan was in his third NBA season, gaining a reputation as a pure scorer who nevertheless wasn’t the sort of Winning Basketball Player who could lead a team over .500, let alone to a championship. I was 11 years old and in the seventh grade.

And a woman named Catherine Russell, an actress who had just turned 30 and had been mostly doing bit off-Broadway roles, was cast as Margaret Thorne Brent, the protagonist of a murder mystery called Perfect Crime. The play’s author, Warren Manzi, was in his mid-20s and was so worried by early reviews accusing the play of being confusing that he would sit in the back of the theater at shows and re-write sections of the script based on audience reactions.

But whatever adjustments he made, Russell was always the star.

If you have not heard of Catherine Russell, that is reasonable: She has only one IMDB credit, serving as a “jury forewoman” on an episode of “Law & Order” back in 2005. (I mean, I have a busier IMDB page than that.) But to be fair: She has been very busy.

Because since that day, April 18, 1987, she has been playing Margaret Thorne Brent, a psychiatrist who may have committed a murder, in Perfect Crime, every single day. She has missed exactly four shows, every one of which were because one of her siblings was getting married. (“They put me in the wedding party so I had to be there,” she said.) She in fact performed in the show on the day of her own wedding; she and her groom went to City Hall at 11 a.m. and signed the papers so she could get back to the theater for opening curtain. She has played the same character, in the same play, every single day, for 39 years. She never, ever stops.

I was in New York this week to cover the World Cup Final, and on Tuesday night, after a work plan fell through because it looked like a tornado was going to hit NYC (it turned out a tornado did not hit NYC), I decided, since I was staying near Times Square, to see a show. There were many options. Nathan Lane is in a “Death of a Salesman” revival; “Hamilton” tickets aren’t even that expensive anymore; I have always wanted to see “The Book of Mormon.”

But then I saw the ad for “Perfect Crime.” And I read the story of Catherine Russell, the woman who has been called “the Cal Ripken of Broadway” (and has even posed for photos with Ripken). I could not resist.

“There are hundreds of ways to say ‘I love you,’ and I have tried them all,” Russell told The New York Times 15 years ago, when she had only been doing the show for 25 years. Perfect Crime runs at The Theater Center, which also hosts “The Office! A Musical Parody” and “Singfeld: An Unauthorized Musical Parody About Nothing,” and sits on 50th and Broadway. This is just one block away from where they perform “Wicked,” but it might as well be 4,000 miles away. The Theater Center is right next to a gentlemen’s club called Bare Elegance, which didn’t strike me from the outside as particularly elegant. The Theater Center is also a theater that requires an elevator to access, a rickety old one that only holds about eight people. On Tuesday, after the play was over, I rode down it with one of the cast members.

Russell is an adjunct professor teaching acting at NYU Steinhardt, but that seems to be just to give herself something to do in the afternoon before the play starts. This play is her entire life. She isn’t just performing at The Theater Center: She is in fact the general manager of the theater, and on days she isn’t teaching, you can find her in the box office, selling tickets.

The theater is small, only 199 seats, and my Tuesday night show was not crowded: I would say there were about 45 of us there. I bought my ticket online beforehand at the sushi restaurant a few blocks away, and I paid $85 to sit in the front row. This is one of those theaters where the front row really is the front row. I had to be careful not to stretch my legs out during the show, lest I accidentally trip one of the performers.

There are four characters in the play: Margaret’s husband; a troubled patient of Margaret’s; a police officer investigating the crime; and Margaret Thorne Brent herself. Not surprisingly, none of the other characters are particularly interesting or played by any other actors of note. (Gary Busey, oddly, played one of the men for two weeks two years ago in his off-Broadway debut, and “The Dukes of Hazzard” star John Schneider took a break from his Newsmax show to pop up a couple of years ago, but otherwise, the men’s parts are played entirely by unknowns.) This is Margaret’s show, which is to say, it is Russell’s. Russell was in her early 30s when she originated the role, so while she is now in her early ‘70s, the role does not seem to have changed all that much; she’s still the mysterious, elusive potential murder suspect who everyone else in the cast is madly in love with. This does not require much of a leap of faith. She looks great—there’s a scene in which her character returns from a run in exercise clothes and it’s very believable that this is a woman who has been running every day of her life—and is so obviously more charismatic than every actor on stage with her that, I mean, of course they’re all madly in love with her.

Stanley Kubrick used to run his actors through hundreds upon hundreds of takes in part to get the “actor” out of them, to make it feel as deadened (and thus normal) as real life. Russell does not read her lines as if she has been saying them every night for 40 years. “Friends ask me: ‘How do you do that every night? Doesn’t it get boring?’ ‘Never,’ I tell them. There are always external events that affect the performance, and there are things I do myself to make each performance a little different,” Russell told the Times 15 years ago. “Then there are the decisions I make to change the role slightly. I say the same lines and stand in the same places show after show, but one night I might decide to be a little nastier to the detective who suspects me, for example. Or I might ask myself: Does she really love him when she says ‘I love you?’ Depending on the night, my mood, the audience, and the particular actor playing the detective, that line changes.”

During Covid, the show was shut down, but Russell lobbied so hard to get the show back going that she actually sued then-New York governor Andrew Cuomo and then-NYC mayor Bill de Blasio to allow The Theater Center open at reduced capacity. Her efforts not only led to her show being the first to return after Covid, but for de Blasio to personally attend and introduce the return performance in April 2021.

The play itself … well, if I’m being entirely honest, if you would have asked me to pick a show that would run consecutively for 40 years, it wouldn’t be this one. The idea of a reliable off-Broadway murder mystery for tourists to see for cheap running forever isn’t a bad one—”it’s like ‘Law & Order,’ honey!—but I’m not sure this is necessarily it. The show is famously confusing, to the point that theater employees—the same ones who took my ticket and made my drink—hand out pamphlets after the show explaining the mystery, and after reading my pamphlet, I’m still not sure I understand it. The stage direction is musty, the sets look older than the written word itself and it is difficult to get too caught up in the glamour and pizzazz of show business when you can hear construction and car horns just outside throughout the performance. The audience, such as it was, had a very “we wanted to say we went to a show on Broadway, and this was the cheapest one” vibe, and they seemed as bewildered by the mystery afterward as I was.

But they were still so happy to be there, and so was I. It was hard not to be in awe of her.

The play actually begins with a videotape of an interview Margaret gives with a television station reporter to promote a new book she has written. The interviewer is played by her late husband Patrick Robustelli, who died in 2019 after 24 years of marriage. It is her way to see him every night. It is a way he gets to live on. “We met when he read an article about me in The Wall Street Journal that said I hadn’t missed a performance in seven years,” she said. “He said he liked being married to ‘a girl who went to work every day.’”

The show is her life. There are other things she could have probably done. There were probably more “Law & Order” guest spots for her, had she wanted them, and she’d surely could have been a formidable soap opera star. But that would have been someone else’s life. This one is hers. And it’s entirely hers. She does her show, she runs the theater, she gets up every day, does exactly what she wants, then goes to bed and gets up the next day to do it again.

“When I was a little girl,” Russell said in an interview in the late ‘90s, “all I wanted to do was be an actress. I wanted to wake up, practice my lines, get in hair and makeup, go out on stage in front of those lights and perform for an audience. Now I get to do that. Every day. What more could I want than that?”

As I get older, I find myself thinking more about my career, and in ways that have a lot less raw ambition than they used to. I once wanted to conquer the world, to be everywhere, to have my work be seen by as many people as possible. I was somewhat successful at this in some ways, and less successful in others, but either way, it always end up being a little bit unsatisfying: When your goal is always to try to get more, you curse yourself to not ever being able to get there, for eternity. There’s always something out of your reach; always someone else who has something you want, which has the added bonus of making you unable to appreciate what you have accomplished. You’re forever on the treadmill. You’re always just a hamster on a wheel trying to get another pellet.

The trick, I’m learning, is just keeping it simple. When I was young, all I wanted to do was write about the things that I cared about—to improve, to follow my own muses, to make a living … to make this my life. My goal was not to become famous, or to be more popular (whatever that means), or to have more people click on my stories, or to have more followers on social media, or to make more money. The goal was to be able to wake up every day, write about the things I care about in the way that I want to write about them, and then go to bed and do the same thing tomorrow. There were distractions along the way, some of them bad, some of them good, but in the end, that’s all that really mattered: Writing about what I find interesting, and making a living at it. Doing the work. And then getting up and doing it again.

And, when I take a step back from it … that’s what I get to do. Every day. What more could I possibly ask for? Catherine Russell could have maybe had more, whatever “more” means, had she done other things, had she gotten restless, had she seen what others had and tried to push that for herself. But she didn’t. She found something that she loved to do, and she, recognizing her incredible good fortune, simply decided to do that every day for the rest of her life. You pick ‘em up, you set ‘em down, you go get ‘em again tomorrow. That sounds like wisdom. That sounds like grace. That sounds like a life extremely well lived. I don’t know what more a person could possibly ask for. I hope she plays that part for another 40 years.

Here is a numerical breakdown of all the things I wrote this week, in order of what I believe to be their quality.

1. What This World Cup Meant, The Washington Post. I miss it already.

2. A Lame World Cup Final, But a Great World Cup, New York. Still incredible to see this in person.

3. What’s the Framework for a Jordan Walker Deal? MLB.com. Think more Bobby Witt Jr. than J.J. Wetherholt.

4. So What’s Up With the Orioles? MLB.com. A tough team to be a fan of right now.

5. I Wrote About Joe Buck on the Eve of His Hall of Fame Induction, MLB.com.

6. About the Future of Movies, The Washington Post. I contributed to this discussion.

PODCASTS

Grierson & Leitch, we discussed “The Odyssey” and “Office Space,” two very similar movies.

Morning Lineup, I did Friday’s show.

Seeing Red, Bernie and I looked at the second half.

LONG STORY YOU SHOULD READ THIS MORNING … OF THE WEEK

“The Wingman,” Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic. Nobody writes better political profiles than Mark Leibovich. Mark Kelly is his ideal subject. (They even kind of look alike.)

ONGOING LETTER-WRITING PROJECT!

This is your reminder that if you write me a letter and put it in the mail, I will respond to it with a letter of my own, and send that letter right to you! It really happens! Hundreds of satisfied customers!

Write me at:

Will Leitch
P.O. Box 48
Athens GA 30603

CURRENTLY LISTENING TO

“Let’s Build a Home,” The White Stripes. I think the new Strokes album is … very sleepy. Say what you will about The White Stripes—the band I will always prefer—but they were never, ever sleepy.

Remember to listen to The Official Will Leitch Newsletter Spotify Playlist, featuring every song ever mentioned in this section. Let this drive your listening, not the algorithm!

The Cardinals have stopped scoring runs, but young William and I still had a grand time at Busch last night.

Best,
Will