Politics
In His Play, a Guard at the Met Finds Solace in the Museum
Patrick Bringley stars in a version of his book, which tells how the Metropolitan Museum’s works of art helped him work through grief.
Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at a museum guard-turned-author-turned playwright who is making his Off Broadway debut. We’ll also get details on a pair of socks with heart-shaped notes that were sent to Luigi Mangione, who is facing murder charges in the killing of an insurance executive on a Midtown street.
Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
After his book was published, Patrick Bringley did what authors do — he gave talks, often at museums, which was appropriate because the book was about the years he spent working in one. “I enjoyed being on a stage and talking to people,” he said.
He will be on a very different stage tonight when he makes his Off Broadway debut, performing the one-man show he wrote.
The title is familiar — it’s the first half of the title of his book, “All the Beauty in the World.” “The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me” was the other half of the book title. The book described his experiences as a guard at the Met and the solace he found amid the Raphaels and El Grecos after his brother became seriously ill. It was the “quieter spaces that taught me about beauty, grace and loss,” he wrote in the book, “and, I suspected, about the meaning of art.”
In the two years since the book was published, he has learned to field the questions that come with a degree of fame and a career as unusual as his: Did you ever imagine this for yourself? What are you, anyway — are you an author? A museum guide? Are you going to go back to guard duty one day? Are you going to write another book?
