The work life of museum guards is often both banal and extraordinary. They spend most of their time standing in corners, staring into space—either at the works of art or at the people milling around the gallery—scolding children who try to climb the sculptures and fielding questions about where to find the toilets. But they also get a lot of thinking time and form unique relationships, both with the art they watch over every day and with each other.
Patrick Bringley worked as a guard at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than a decade, describing his experience in the best-selling memoir All the Beauty in the World (2023). He now stars as a version of himself in a one-man Off-Broadway show of the same name, dressed as a Met guard and regaling audiences in his soft, calming voice with meditative tales of unscrupulous visitors, the colourful backstories of his colleagues and, of course, about some of his favourite works of art.
“I started doing talks at art museums after the book came out, and I noticed I wasn’t nervous,” Bringley tells The Art Newspaper. “My mom was an actor, and I enjoyed being onstage in front of people doing something communal. It seemed natural for the next step of my story to be a one-man play. I’m able to evoke what it was like standing in the galleries.”
Bringley demonstrates very specifically how a museum guard leans against a wall towards the beginning of his play. “Hands together, fleshy part at the tailbone. Legs out about 30 degrees. Ankles crossed,” he says onstage. “I’ve seen a 100-year-old picture of a colleague leaning like this. The technology’s never been improved upon.”
These delightful behind-the-scenes moments—who knew each guard gets $80 per year to buy black socks?—create a rapport with the audience for the much more personal story of the death of Bringley’s brother, his subsequent marriage and the birth of his children. The three threads of work, art and family weave throughout the 80-minute play, creating a full tapestry of Bringley’s experiences. “I tried to fit the elements together in a way that was balanced,” he says.
In his book, Bringley highlights more than 100 works of art. In the play, he focuses on about a dozen, many of them Old Masters. He calls the paintings “gold-framed windows”. Onstage, these painted glimpses into another world appear projected onto three giant framed screens—the brainchild of Dominic Dromgoole,the former artistic director of London’s Globe Theatre, who directed Bringley’s one-man show.
The three screens show the art Bringley references in his monologue—sometimes in full, sometimes zoomed in on their astonishing details. As Bringley philosophises about the different kinds of views into the world these “windows” provide, Titian’s Portrait of a Man (around 1515) appears. The face reminds him of his brother, Tom, who died at age 26 after a long battle with cancer. (Bringley started his Met job shortly thereafter, seeking peace and solitude.)
Although Bringley’s personal stories and those of the art he works alongside serve as a backbone for his play, the most engaging and memorable moments are his encounters with fellow guards. There are around 500 people who work at the Met as guards, and the group is at least as diverse as New York City itself. Bringley estimates that around 60% of them are born outside of the US.
“We speak all the languages. We can do all the things,” Bringley says in the show. “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. This is the marvelous thing about so-called unskilled jobs: people with a fantastic range of skills work them.”
Appropriately, Bringley’s favourite story about his time at the Met is not about a painting or a museum visitor but about one of his coworkers. He befriended a man named Joseph Akakpousa, who had moved to New York from Togo, where he was a banking executive who fled the country after narrowly surviving an assassination attempt. The two worked together in the Astor Chinese Garden Court, a Ming Dynasty scholar’s garden with an iconic, round Moon Gate as its entrance. This is a remarkable space to stumble across in the middle of a massive museum, and it was Akakpousa’s favourite. Years later, at Akakpousa’s retirement dinner, he showed Bringley a picture of a house he had been building in Ghana, where he intended to move part-time—the entrance looked exactly like the Moon Gate.
“Here you’ve got an American boy talking to an American man from Togo, about a Chinese scholar’s garden on Fifth Avenue in New York City, that he’s building around the world in Ghana.” Bringley says onstage. “And that’s just par for the course. That’s the little world that I’m privileged to be a part of. And of course, that’s also the big world that we’re all a part of.”
Bringley made sure to invite all the Met guards to the final dress rehearsal of his play. “I was proud to have some aspect of their story represented,” he says.
All the Beauty in the World, DR2 Theatre, New York until 25 May. A special post-show conversation between Patrick Bringley and the actor Patrick Page will take place on 22 May
