In His Play, a Guard at the Met Finds Solace in the Museum

New York Times

27-03-2025

Good morning. It's Thursday. Today we'll look at a museum guard-turned-author-turned playwright who is making his Off Broadway debut. We'll also get details on a pair of socks with heart-shaped notes that were sent to Luigi Mangione, who is facing murder charges in the killing of an insurance executive on a Midtown street.
After his book was published, Patrick Bringley did what authors do — he gave talks, often at museums, which was appropriate because the book was about the years he spent working in one. 'I enjoyed being on a stage and talking to people,' he said.
He will be on a very different stage tonight when he makes his Off Broadway debut, performing the one-man show he wrote.
The title is familiar — it's the first half of the title of his book, 'All the Beauty in the World.' 'The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me' was the other half of the book title. The book described his experiences as a guard at the Met and the solace he found amid the Raphaels and El Grecos after his brother became seriously ill. It was the 'quieter spaces that taught me about beauty, grace and loss,' he wrote in the book, 'and, I suspected, about the meaning of art.'
In the two years since the book was published, he has learned to field the questions that come with a degree of fame and a career as unusual as his: Did you ever imagine this for yourself? What are you, anyway — are you an author? A museum guide? Are you going to go back to guard duty one day? Are you going to write another book?
When people ask questions like those, 'I tell them I am taking this one step at a time,' he said.
'I did not imagine this for myself,' he said. 'I don't know what the future of this play will be.' And yes, he would like to write another book. 'It's not quite ready for prime time yet,' he said.
As for his turn as a playwright and performer, Bringley gave the premiere of the play last year during the Charleston Literary Festival in South Carolina. For the Off Broadway production, he is again working with the British director Dominic Dromgoole, a former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, the theater built to re-create the Elizabethan playhouse in London.
'I am a rank amateur when it comes to being on the stage,' he said, although he grew up around the stage.
His mother, Maureen Gallagher, was a theater actor in Chicago. Bringley remembers seeing her play Emily Dickinson in 'The Belle of Amherst' at the Body Politic Theater there. 'I was spellbound by it, because at that moment as an 8-year-old, I decided I'm a writer and started scribbling in notebooks, and writing poetry,' he said. She won a Joseph Jefferson Award for her role in that production — 'the Chicago kind of Tony,' Bringley said.
He also remembers when she took him to see Shakespeare — how the house lights went down, how the stage lights went up and how he had realized 'that this space had been set aside for this otherworldly thing to take place.'
He said he had left 'the blocking and visualization' of the play to Drumgoole, who is also credited as the scenic designer. And he said Drumgoole had helped him learn to deliver his lines.
'If I say something,' he said, 'and he can tell I'm just reciting it in a certain way that just sounds right in my ear, he'll say: 'Too much music. There's too much music,' by which he means it shouldn't sound sonorous in the way might if you're giving an oration.'
Or, a play is different from a lecture.
'If you give a lecture, you're just a guy with a PowerPoint explaining what it is,' Bringley said. 'Theater's not like that at all. You're going to watch me having these experiences. I'm there in the moment. I'm in my dark blue suit rekindling these feelings that I had — being alone in the galleries, and also mixing it up with the visitors and my fellow guards. Even though I'm playing myself, it's acting.'
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The heart-shaped notes in socks intended for Mangione
Luigi Mangione didn't like the socks.
They had arrived with a heart-shaped note tucked in the package. 'Know there are thousands of people wishing you luck,' the note said, according to prosecutors.
Mangione 'first changed into and later changed out' of the socks before a court appearance last month, 'because he felt that 'they did not look good,'' according to court documents that became public on Wednesday. He went to the Feb. 21 hearing with bare ankles, cuffed together with shackles.
Mangione has been charged with gunning down Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, on a sidewalk outside a Midtown hotel on Dec. 4. Mangione was arrested five days later in a fast-food restaurant in Altoona, Pa.
The socks came to light as prosecutors and Mangione's lawyers sparred over what his access to evidence should be and whether he was being given special treatment at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he is being held. Mangione's lawyers said he needed a laptop so he could look at evidence and help with his defense. They said that if he could not access the material electronically, they would have to print out more than 15,000 pages for him to go over in his cell.
The detention center typically bars detainees from having laptops, prosecutors said. They also objected to providing raw video surveillance footage for him to review and said it would be an 'impossibility' to redact the images to block out people not directly related to the case.
As for the socks, the court filing said that members of Mangione's legal team had handed 'a bag of clothing' to a court officer involved in taking Mangione to the hearing last month. Among the items in the bag was 'a new pair of argyle socks wrapped around cardboard.' Two heart-shaped handwritten notes had been 'secreted in the cardboard' — the one wishing him luck and another 'addressed to an unknown person named 'Joan,'' the filing said.
There was no indication that Mangione saw the notes.
Postal Service
Dear Diary:
After days of going back and forth with the Postal Service about the whereabouts of a package I was expecting from my mother, I went to the post office at the corner of 11th Street and Fourth Avenue just after it opened at 9 a.m.
As I waited empty-handed in line behind several people who were holding packages, a middle-aged woman in a postal uniform approached me.
'Baby, are you picking up a package?' she asked.
I nodded.
She motioned me with her finger out of the line, and we walked toward the back of the post office.
'Package pickup isn't usually until 10 a.m.,' she said, looking at my confirmation slip. 'But let me see what I can do for you.'
She walked off and then reappeared two minutes later with a large brown box.
'Here you go, baby,' she said, handing me the package. 'You have a good day now.'
I thanked her and turned to leave. As I did, I heard her speaking to another person in line: 'Baby, you picking up a package?'
— Oona Pritchard
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Hannah Fidelman, Sarah Goodman and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [e-mail].
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