A Met Security Guard Gets an Off-Broadway Show

When Patrick Bringley was 25, his older brother, a brilliant doctoral student, died from cancer. Reeling from the loss, Bringley decided to put his burgeoning career at the New Yorker on hold. A visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his mother offered an unexpected reprieve: lingering in front of paintings, he found solace in simply being allowed to “dwell in silence.”

The experience planted a seed. Not long after, he left his job at the august magazine and accepted a position as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he would spend the next ten years in quiet observation and contemplation, immersing himself in the rhythms of the 2.5-million-square-foot temple.

This period of grief and soul-searching is chronicled in Bringley’s 2023 memoir, All the Beauty in the World. Like Jenny Odell’s bestselling How to Do Nothing, Bringley’s book advances a subtle argument for stepping out of the relentless churn of productivity. Odell frames this as a political act—an assertion of presence in a world that demands constant striving—while Bringley treats contemplation as a kind of devotion, an act of quiet reverence before great works of art. The book urges museumgoers to resist the impulse to rush through galleries and instead embrace a slower way of seeing. His story, praised by critics like Mary Jo Murphy of the Washington Post for its “refreshing sincerity and absence of edginess,” has now been brought to life in a one-man stage adaptation of the same name, starring the author.

Where his book allowed Bringley to parcel out his thoughts in long leisurely paragraphs, the 80-minute play, which runs through May 18, condenses key points. After recounting his decision to take the Met job—it created a “loophole by which I could drop out of the forward-marching world”—Bringley assumes the position of a museum guard: hands folded behind his back, feet angled at thirty degrees, ankles crossed. He regales us with the minutiae of his profession: each guard is allotted an $80 annual “hose allowance” for replacement socks; he and his colleagues take cat naps on locker room benches and use ties for eye masks, which he demonstrates. As part of the “third platoon” crew, he works two 12-hour days and two 8-hour days, and quickly learns that wood floors are much gentler on the soles than marble ones. He estimates that sixty percent of his peers are foreign born, and that many have taken similarly circuitous paths to the institution’s halls. “I know guards who have farmed, framed houses, driven cabs, flown airliners, walked a beat as a cop, reported a beat for a newspaper, taught kindergarten, commanded a frigate in the Bay of Bengal,” he tells us.

More than 180 artworks are mentioned in Bringley’s book, but only about a dozen are projected upon the three large frames on the stage of the DR2 Theatre. Among these are Titian’s portrait of a young man, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters, and Hieronymus Bosch’s The Adoration of the Magi. Bringley displays an unhurried attention to the splendor of paintings, statues, and ancient artifacts telling us of their provenance and historical significance. Titian’s picture of a male youth is “like a reflection on a sunlit pond.” Bruegel’s famous 1565 painting marked a turning point in Western art as one of the earliest paintings wherein the landscape itself takes center stage. To gaze at these projected paintings is to feel time gather rather than pass—to sense not a linear progression but a charged, expansive present.

Soon after taking up his post, as Bringley put it in his memoir, he “surrendered to the turtleish movement of a watchman’s time. I can’t fill it, or kill it, or fritter it into smaller bits. What might be excruciating if suffered for an hour or two is oddly easy to bear in large doses.” As the images wink in and out of the frames, a dong sounds, like something you might hear in a sound bath class, summoning you into a ring of meditation.

The sparse the set (designed by Dominic Dromgoole) befits the show’s intimate form but occasionally acquires the slickness of a TED Talk. Bringley’s background in event planning at The New Yorker is evident throughout in his polished delivery: his measured cadence, his direct engagement with the audience, and his rote gesturing lend the production a well-rehearsed, if seminar-like quality (an earlier version of the play was presented at the Charleston Literary Festival last year).

When he asks the audience for volunteers who might play a few of the commonly identified “species” of museum visitors (sightseer, dinosaur hunter, art lover), the subsequent script leans more stale than spontaneous. The chosen playgoers are handed slips of papers and asked to read aloud inane questions like “Where’s the bathroom?” or “Does the Met have the Mona Lisa?,” disrupting the flow of the monologue and contributing little to the proceedings. Why not risk a moment or two of real spontaneity, even if it’s only to invite the spectators to scribble down questions for Bringley as they enter the theatre?

Bringley has dedicated the show to his mother, a former Chicago theatre actress. Unfortunately, he did not inherit the charisma of a natural thespian that Gavin Creel did. Creel successfully powered a Met-inspired solo piece the same year Bringley’s memoir was published. A magnetic Broadway actor who passed away last year, Creel was commissioned by the Met to create a performance responding to some works in the museum’s vast holdings. The result was a buoyant song cycle titled Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice (you can watch an early iteration online) that makes for a stark contrast with All the Beauty in the World: Creel is a bounding ball of energy while Bringley plays things close to the vest.

Yet both take an unfussy delight in art. Creel’s advice to harried art appreciators—“Look. And breathe. And wait.”—echoes the museum guard’s counsel to take things slowly. If Bringley’s show doesn’t ultimately evoke the kinds of epiphanies that are a hallmark of the most cherished works of art he lauds, it nonetheless offers quieter pleasures. I mean it as a compliment to its star when I urge you to walk, not run, to see it.