All the Beauty in the World Jumps from Print to Stage

Patrick Bringley spent 10 years as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He had just lost his brother to cancer and was seeking a way to appease the grief. The result was a life-changing decade that led to a lovely and wildly popular book called All the Beauty in the World.

After doing many talks about the book, Bringley was eager to continue to recount his stories: and his appreciation of the great art he had gazed at every day on New York’s most famous walls. “Writing is a lonely profession to begin with,” he says, “so the hope was to share it with more people.”

The key turning point turned out to be an artistic festival in Charleston, South Carolina, where he spoke about the book. But more important, it is where he met met a stage director named Dominic Dromgoole. “Dominic heartily believed that this could be turned into a one-man play,” says Bringley. And now that play is about to open at off-Broadway’s prestigious DR2 Theatre, near Union Square, offering his own unique perspective as a guard with time on his hands, guarding some of the greatest artworks in the world. After the death of his younger brother, he had quit a job at The New Yorker to take a job as a guard in the great museum as he dealt with his own devastating loss.

“I do know his director, Dominic, and I’ve worked with him in the past,” says Daryl Roth, the woman behind the venue. “Yes, it is a very good fit for my theater, and I hope people will appreciate it.”

Bringley, it turns out, is no stranger to the world of theater. His mother was an actress in Chicago, who performed and won awards for the one-woman show The Belle of Amherst, about Emily Dickinson. “I was 8 when I first saw that,” he recalls. “She was a believer in all the arts,” he says, “and took us often to Chicago’s great art museum. So, theater lives in my DNA.” Bringley’s mother is now in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, but she’ll be at her son’s performance.

Audience members will be transported too. And possibly asked to participate. “There is one part where I start interacting with them,” says Bringley. “I use members to stand in for the people who are at the Met. There is no fourth wall, per se, but with one-person shows, the other character is essentially the audience.”

If there is another show that somewhat resembles this one it is 300 Paintings, which recently played at The Vineyard. That featured one character telling us about how he came to discover the connection between art and, in his case, mental issues. In Bringley’s story, it’s about a man whose job is to protect the art (and patrons, if need be), which also turned out to be good therapy for terrible personal loss.

The author/playwright/performer is most hopeful that the show will inspire others to visit museums and focus on great works of art. “I hope they’ll feel a sense of wonder and adoration and sometimes lamentation too . . . and other feelings spurred by great paintings,” he says. “Those works are often about suffering and very elemental things. Done with clarity and majesty. And I hope people walk away interested in the backstage life of a museum guard, basically a blue-collar job in a famous and great space. One that changed my life.”

Not a bad place to spend a decade, and heal from unspeakable sadness. Readers have devoured Patrick Bringley’s written words. Now they can enjoy the spoken version.

All The Beauty in the World began a limited engagement at the DR2 Theatre on March 27.