Fashion
From Museum Guard to Memoirist, and Now the Play’s His Thing
With Patrick Bringley’s “All the Beauty in the World” now in its 10th printing, he’s debuting in two new roles: playwright and actor.
Looking up, stage left.
Patrick Bringley — celebrated author, rookie playwright — stood beneath a maple tree in Green-Wood Cemetery recently, reading aloud lines from one of his monologues, a powerful recollection about a man from Togo whom he got to know when they worked as security guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That man came to the United States after a failed assassination attempt on his life in his home country, where he had been a banker. He wound up in New York patrolling the marble halls of the Met, wearing the guard’s blue polyester blazer.
“So many stories under the blue jacket,” Bringley mused, going on to call his former workplace “a world in miniature.”
Move downstage left.
A few feet away, Dominic Dromgoole, a theater director from London, lay on his back in the grass, listening intently as Bringley — who is also making his debut as an actor — rehearsed his lines.
Occasionally Dromgoole interjected, instructing Bringley to enunciate or to slow a delivery. At one point he told him to instill “a sort of breezy optimism” into what he was saying. At another he instructed him to remove “the piety” from his reading.
