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Epoch Times
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Epoch Times
‘All the Beauty in the World': Learning to Stop and Really Look
NEW YORK—To some, working as a museum guard may seem a mind-numbing task, one that includes 12-hour standing shifts. In his one-person show, 'All the Beauty in the World,' Patrick Bringley explains why he chose this career path and what he found there. Written and performed by Bringley and based on his bestselling novel of the same name, the play can currently be seen at the DR2 Theatre. After the loss of his older brother due to cancer, Bringley, then 22 years old and working at New Yorker Magazine as a greeter and gofer, felt the need to find a job where he wasn't always jumping from one assignment to another. He wanted a place where he could, in effect, learn to stand still. His search led him to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, after an initial probationary period, he was assigned to one of the numerous exhibits on display. His job as a guard? To observe what he sees in silence. Patrick Bringley in his one man play, "All the Beauty in the World." Joan Marcus For Bringley, the job offered an opportunity to relate one-to-one with the art pieces. While he was posted to just about every exhibit the museum had to offer during his tenure, he admits a particular affinity for paintings by the old masters. These works were created in a period that ranges from approximately 1230 to 1820. Said paintings at the museum currently number 8,458, and yes, Bringley has counted them. Included in this collection are 206 works depicting various images of Jesus, which he says calls to mind a gigantic 'family photo album.' Bringley's steady voice makes him a congenial host as he talks about his relationship with his brother. He explains the contentment he has found because of his career change, offering the audience a chance to understand what he experienced. One of his great joys was that, in looking at the paintings so often, he was able to identify certain details in a work that others wouldn't take the time to see. In focusing on these details, alongside the overall artwork, Bringley realized how easy it is to miss so much of what is right before us when we rush from one thing to another—be it from job to job or painting to painting. Related Stories 4/13/2025 4/11/2025 Bringley relates how, in standing in a gallery for up to 12 hours a day (with breaks), he learned to exist within that time, not to merely mark its passing. He learned that the best way of doing this was to study the works of art. When he tired of that, he studied the people who came to see them. A life full of rushing and busyness prevents people from appreciating the little details, says Patrick Bringley in his one-man play, "All the Beauty in the World." Joan Marcus Interspersed with these recollections is information that helps ensure a guard's comfort on the job: the importance of standing on wooden floors as opposed to marble, the correct technique of how to lean while on duty, and how to get a few winks of sleep during a break. Bringley recalls comments and questions he has gotten from visitors over the years. There's the the casual sightseer, who came to see the most famous paintings; the dinosaur hunter, usually someone who had mistakenly come to the wrong museum; and the lone wolf, a person who would sit and stare at a single painting for hours on end. Bringley's favorite time at the museum was in the early morning—about a half hour before the museum opens—when he could enjoy the quiet while among the Old Masters before officially reporting for work. There's more than a bit of irony in his voice as he talks about becoming a father and how caring for a squirming, demanding infant is completely opposite of the tranquility he'd become accustomed to as a guard. Patrick Bringley explains how different the silence and stillness of the museum was compared to the noise and activity involved in caring for an infant, in "All the Beauty in the World." Joan Marcus Perhaps most fascinating are Bringley's descriptions of parts of the museum visitors never see. Underneath the floors of exhibits is another world. Here are numerous stored works of art, items in the process of coming and going to museums and galleries around the world, repair and restoration shops, a loading dock, tailor shop, and the area where arriving guards change into their uniforms before reporting for duty. Bringley notes how the guards at the Met are of many nationalities and have varied former professions. They range from teachers and policeman to farmers and even a former frigate captain. It's not unusual to hear many different languages spoken while underground. With Austin Switser's excellent projection design work, which displays the museum objects and paintings discussed, 'All the Beauty in the World' shows the importance of giving oneself time to discover what is personally important. Through that, one can begin to realize how beautiful, enlightening, and varied the world can actually be. 'All the Beauty in the World' DR2 Theatre 103 E. 15th St., New York City Tickets: 212-239-6200 and What arts and culture topics would you like us to cover? Please email ideas or feedback to
The Independent
06-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
How a grieving museum guard found healing in art – then a bestselling memoir and a play
At the age of 25, Patrick Bringley realised he no longer had the appetite for his glitzy job on the events team at The New Yorker. It was 2008, and he'd just lived through the death of his 26-year-old brother, Tom, from cancer. 'I had lost someone, I did not wish to move on from that,' Bringley writes in his memoir, All the Beauty in the World. 'In a sense, I didn't wish to move at all.' He found a job that fitted his state of mind, as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. Ten long years passed, with Bringley standing watch as visitors moved through the vast museum, marvelling at its treasures. Now, Bringley is preparing to tread the boards at the off-Broadway DR2 Theatre for the opening night of his one-man show based on his bestselling memoir. 'I can rekindle these feelings when I'm on stage,' he tells me. We're standing in the atrium outside the museum's American wing, bathed in light from the glass ceiling. Facing us is the grand, 19th-century facade of a Wall Street bank. 'They tore it down in the 1910s,' Bringley, now 41, tells me matter-of-factly. 'The Met said, 'We'll take it!'' Since the publication of his book in 2023, the writer, who has an undergraduate degree from New York University and a master's in history from nearby Hunter College, has led private tours at the Met, which he says are 'lucrative'. Now, Bringley is bringing his memoir to life on stage with the help of Dominic Dromgoole, former artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe in London. 'There seemed something so natural to me about doing a one-man show about a lonesome figure like a guard,' says Bringley. 'It just makes a certain cosmic sense.' At first glance, Bringley looks gentle and unassuming. He's dressed for our meeting in jeans and a slouchy blazer. His wispy blond hair is somewhere between neat and unkempt – respectable. When he speaks, however, Bringley has the mesmerising air of a man who's found enlightenment. 'What was extraordinary about coming to this place, and my job, is that I was forced to step outside the normal flow of life. And when you do that, you realise that you can start thinking with an incredible freedom,' he tells me, 'because you're not just forced to funnel your thoughts down into some actionable little piece of intelligence that's going to forward your career, or impress the guy sitting next to you. Instead, I can think grandiose thoughts, or foolish thoughts, or experimental thoughts. You can stop and think, 'What the hell is this existence?' The sort of things a philosopher would think, or a Buddhist monk would think. 'And here, you have so many things to ping that off against,' he adds, casting a hand around at the Met's innumerable masterpieces. 'And I found it to be the only way to really perceive the true beauty, and mystery, and majesty, and strangeness of this existence.' Days later, I'm speaking to Dromgoole about his earnest new apprentice. 'He's got a good, bright spirit,' he tells me. 'You just think, God, that's somebody who has worked out how to walk well through the world.' The pair met at the Charleston Literary Festival in 2023, bonding over their mutual love of Shakespeare before Bringley gave a presentation on his book. Dromgoole was instantly impressed. 'He's got a very seemingly guileless way of looking quite 'Aw, shucks', and quite innocent, and then taking you through to places you don't expect to go to, that are quite rich and quite profound.' Across 80 minutes on stage, Bringley will portray himself, fellow guards, museum visitors, and even his late brother. 'I spent about three hours a day for 10 weeks just running lines,' he says of memorising the gargantuan script. He did so while taking walks around Central Park or riding one of New York's many public ferries, listening to himself in his headphones – playing, pausing, remembering. The irony of going from a stoic watchman to an orator is not lost on him. 'I used to be very, very quiet for a living. Now I just talk, like, half a million words every day.' Over several months of rehearsals, Dromgoole taught Bringley how to translate his prose for a live audience. Sometimes, his advice was broad. 'Every thought that you're speaking, you're having for the first time,' Dromgoole told him. 'It has to pop, it can't be monotone.' Other times, the director homed in on specific lines, telling Bringley to deliver them with 'more violence' or 'less piety'. 'Sometimes he reaches for cosmic statements,' Dromgoole says of Bringley's writing, 'and sometimes that works, but that always has to be fed by a bedrock of specificity, and banality, and plain and boring details.' In particular, the director was keen to include more details about life as a guard to balance Bringley's more philosophical musings. For instance, Met guards walk so far each day that they're paid a 'hose allowance' of $80 (£62) a year for socks. In one chapter of his book, Bringley recalls being told by a wizened older colleague that 12 hours standing on wood floors is like eight hours on marble. 'As well as the big questions about art and life, you want it to have just information about procedure,' says Dromgoole. 'It's lovely in that it does open up those big questions, but you just have to get the balance right.' During the play, Bringley will once again don his old dark-blue suit – the uniform of the Met guards. He was adamant that his former colleagues should be among the first to see his play, and for free. However, when he put it to the producers, they suggested a meagre discount. 'Ten per cent,' he says, incredulous. 'I was like, 'You cannot offer these people a 10 per cent discount.'' Luckily, someone had the idea of inviting them to the dress rehearsal, which is happening the day after our conversation. When I speak to Dromgoole afterwards, he describes the night as 'terrific'. 'Because everything he said about them in the book is true... They were a truly, astonishingly, genuinely various group of people.' Seeing them all in a room, he said, 'You'd never guess what the connection was.' Of course, revisiting his memoir has meant Bringley inhabiting a younger version of himself – one that is still grieving. Has it been an emotional process, living in those shoes again? 'It has,' he says, pausing thoughtfully. 'It's your job as an actor, when you are actually performing it, to relive the things that you're talking about – and some of the things are painful, and some of the things are beautiful.' It's all in the pursuit of making a human connection. He's hoping people will leave the theatre feeling 'like they really experienced something', not just a man giving an art history lecture. 'Even the parts that are about being a museum guard, that's all true of anyone who walks into a museum and spends a few hours in solitude, or out in the woods,' he says. 'That is something that feels numinous, that feels beyond words, that feels somehow more elemental. And I'm trying to kindle that feeling on stage.'
New York Times
27-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
In His Play, a Guard at the Met Finds Solace in the Museum
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.' Expect sunny skies with temperatures in the low 50s. In the evening, temperatures will drop to the low 40s, with a chance of showers. In effect until March 31 (Eid al-Fitr). The latest metro news 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 nytoday@ Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
Korea Herald
11-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Korea Herald
As a museum guard, he stood in silence for a decade, but now world is listening
'All the Beauty in the World' author, former Met security guard Patrick Bringley on art and loss, his unexpected global journey and what's next Patrick Bringley never imagined that his memoir about working as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York would resonate globally. But when 'All the Beauty in the World' became an international bestseller, finding especially enthusiastic readers in South Korea, he knew something profound was at play. 'I wrote this book 7,000 miles away, sitting in an apartment in New York City. I had no idea if what I was writing would land with anybody. Because after all, it was about a job where I was mostly by myself, quietly thinking thoughts in solitude,' said Bringley to a packed room of 400 readers at Kyobo Book Center in Seoul, Saturday. 'There is clearly something universal about art, about beauty, about loss, and I'm just so grateful that it's struck a chord here. It's something I never would have expected.' His debut memoir, published in Korea last year, received an enthusiastic response, selling 250,000 copies and topping the country's bestseller list for the first half of the year. The 41-year-old author said that while he had traveled extensively within the United States for book talks, his international visits had been limited to few countries, including England, the United Arab Emirates, and now Korea. 'I'm bewildered but there's probably not one simple reason. It's clear that something about the music of the book has resonated in this country. So many people felt a connection with not only the story but with its tone and mood,' said Bringley in an interview with The Korea Herald afterward. Finding solace in art Before becoming a museum guard, Bringley worked at The New Yorker, where he once thought he had landed at the top of the world. But when his older brother, Tom, was diagnosed with cancer, and later passed away, Bringley found himself unable to return to the office. Instead he sought refuge in the quietest place he knew, where time seemed to stand still -- working as a security guard at the Met. 'For 10 years -- almost 2,000 days, I got nothing done. And you know that was the job. If my hands were empty, my head was up and I was looking around to see the way things are, I was doing my job perfectly.' He said he had done nothing but those long, quiet hours of standing watch for 8-12 hours a day with the museum's greatest masterworks, became a time for profound reflection and appreciation. In time, Bringley transformed his experience into a story: part portrait of the Met, and part memoir about the loss his family suffered and the solace he found in the museum. He encourages museumgoers to approach art with the same patience. 'My first piece of advice when entering an art museum is to quiet yourself down. And to spend minutes or hours just feeling small.' But he also believes art should empower, not intimidate. 'There's another way of thinking about art museums because these museums are showcasing the talents and capacities of human beings -- of you and of me. We should feel proud, empowered, challenged and engaged rather than just silent and invisible and small.' Bringley emphasized that it's important not only to learn about art, but also to learn from it. 'Don't feel intimidated. Don't feel as if there's anyone upstairs that has the right answers. Nobody has the right answers. Everyone is qualified to have their own thoughts.' Acting debut and next book Bringley recently took his storytelling a step further, adapting 'All the Beauty in the World' into a one-man play in which he made his debut as playwright and actor. The 80-minute monologue premiered at the Charleston Literary Festival in South Carolina, in November last year. 'Memorizing the lines was very hard,' he admitted. 'And it's different because (in talks) I can be just casual whereas in the play, I'm pretending to be myself from the time when I was a guard. So even though I'm just being myself, it's like having to create a work of art.' Bringley said the play will soon open in New York this spring for at least two-month run. He is also in the early stages of writing his second book, which he hopes will explore the act of seeing -- how to truly look at art, how to let it come to you, and how to absorb as opposed to just glancing around. 'I want to begin with art but then bridge out to other things because one of the reasons we look at art is to teach ourselves to see the world out there.'
