****/***** (four out of five stars)
There is no place quite like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and no people who know it quite as intimately as the hundreds of security guards who pace its marble and wood floors—and who can tell you which material is easier on the feet (it’s wood). Patrick Bringley’s 2023 memoir of his time there, All the Beauty in the World, brought together his reflections on love, grief, time, friendship, work, and art, in a cohesive package that was unlike anything else. His current one-man show of the same name, now running at the DR2 Theatre in Union Square, is much more than a simple retread of the book’s material, though there is overlap.
Standing in the guard’s classic posture–leaning forward, hands posed to cushion the tailbone, slight bend in the back, one leg crossed over the other—Bringley exudes a quiet sense of lived-in authority onstage. He paces the stage in his old uniform, inviting us into his life at the museum in a way that only theater makes possible. There is something precious, he suggests, about time’s elasticity (he describes his hours at the Met as “capacious,” but any story of grief is a story of needing more time), and about the plain physical fact of everyone in the room choosing to spend that 90 minutes together.
We, in the audience, experience a selection of specific artworks, which Bringley discusses like old friends. And why wouldn’t he? He has probably spent more time with them than nearly anyone now living. In docent mode, Bringley picks a painting, for example, Pieter Breugel the Elder’s The Harvesters, and directs our attention to individual sections with the assurance of someone who has studied it for dozens of hours. The immediacy of the art on display, blown up so that the details can be seen from the back row (Projection Design by Austin Switser), is like a shortcut for those without the time or stamina to study one piece for hours on end.
This could have been a static show–the man’s job was literally to stand in place for 8-12 hours a day–but Bringley and Dominic Dromgoole (director/set design) do a very fine job of bringing in a physicality and sense of motion. Three wooden benches, arranged diagonally, are also platforms, hospital beds, and even the site of the tiniest of naps, while the three screens, also staggered, provide a dynamic visual backdrop that welcomes the audience into a space consecrated to the visual arts.
More intriguing than the discussion of the art itself is the peek behind the curtain of the museum’s operations: the other guards, of course, who hail from every corner of the globe; but also the entire support system around them, from the dispatcher, who sends every guard to their post, to a man named Joey Buttons, whose job consists of mending uniforms. The Met’s vast underbelly, where the less-favored (or damaged) art is stored out of sight, could probably support an entire show of its own. Bringley also shines a soft light on the art lovers and tourists milling about his domain, gently ribbing a few archetypes and the questions they pose him (“Where are the dinosaurs?”).
Bringley’s relationship with his late brother Tom, frames his experience at the museum, not chronologically, but in the way a house’s frame structures it from the inside. There is a deep meditation here on love, and grief, and memory, all expressed in the way Bringley makes the time and space to talk about Tom, and bring him to life for a roomful of people, if only for a few minutes. This is another thing art can do.
All the Beauty in the World. Through May 25 at the DR2 Theatre (103 East 15th Street, at Union Square East).
