Grieving the death of his older brother from cancer, journalist Patrick Bringley left his job at The New Yorker, with his perch above Broadway and 42nd Street, and found solace is an unusual way, standing 12 hours a day as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In retreating from the frenetic Times Square world to surround himself with art he found that the world came to him through the eclectic backgrounds of his fellow guards and the visitors circling through the famous museum. He turned this decade-long experience into a New York Times bestselling memoir, All the Beauty in the World, and now a one-man play that opened last night at DR2 Theatre.
On a chilly, rainy Saturday afternoon, perfect for going to a museum or play, I felt I was doing a bit of both through director Dominic Dromgoole’s set and Abigail Hoke-Brady’s lighting. With only several narrow backless benches of the kind found in front of paintings in museums and three large gold picture frames hanging staggered one behind the other from the ceiling onto which masterworks from the Met were projected (projection design by Austin Switser) Bringley enters in a guard’s uniform to spend a leisurely 75 minutes telling his story.
Like a good journalist and playwright, he starts by setting the scene. “The morning is church mouse quiet. I arrive on my post about a half hour before the museum opens and there is nothing to bring my thoughts down to earth. It’s just me and the Rembrandts. It’s just me and the Botticellis. Just me and these vibrant phantoms that are also,” he pauses, then “my companions hanging around all day, same as me.”
I enjoyed his comments on the visitors in contrast to his connection to the artworks, such as when people wander in “on the hunt for water lilies or sunflowers” and find themselves surrounded by religious paintings.
“Some people are overwhelmed by all the Jesuses but me, I adore working in the Jesus pictures. In these galleries it isn’t like wandering in a foreign city. It’s more intimate, it’s like being inside of a family photo album that’s somewhat grim but very poignant and you come to know all the episodes from the short hard life of this one man from first century Judea.”
For him, the visitors, too, become works of art, “the roving unframed strangers in the room who are suddenly wildly beautiful.”
And through his observations and answering questions he finds healing.
“Grief is, among other things, a loss of rhythm. You lose someone, it puts a hole in your life and for a time you huddle down in that hole. Vibrations don’t reach you. The cords are all cut. Coming here I saw an opportunity to linger in a place that seemed uniquely untouched by the rhythms of the everyday.”
But with time “the rhythms find me and their invitations are alluring. It turns out I don’t wish to stay quiet and lonesome forever. And the people who really break down my walls are wearing my same suit of clothes.”
He then gives us little verbal portraits of his fellow guards, those 300 or so people who every morning “converge on the Met by bus, by ferry, by trains from the five boroughs.”
He concludes by reflecting on what he didn’t understand a decade before he took up his post.
“Sometimes life can be about simplicity and stillness in the vein of a watchful guard amid shimmering works of art. But it is also about the head-down work of living and struggling and growing and creating.
“And that’s beautiful too.
“It’s what we do, it has to be.”
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