After his one-man play, All the Beauty in the World—based on his memoir about his brother’s death and his time of healing as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York—closes this weekend, playwright, actor and author Patrick Bringley plans to return to his writing.
Patrick Bringley, in his one-man play, “All the Beauty in the World”
Joan Marcus
In a recent interview with Forbes.com, Bringley, whose play is based on his New York Times best-selling memoir of the same name, said, “for the past two years, I’ve just done nothing but run my mouth. It’s going to be great to have another period of monkish withdrawal, and think about something new and fresh. I want to write.”
The play’s website calls Bringley’s memoir and play “a portrait of one man’s life through a time of transition. While looking for somewhere to contemplate his life and heal from his brother’s death, Patrick quits” his job as an event planner at The New Yorker, “and seeks refuge in the most beautiful place he can think of: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through his job as a museum guard, Patrick starts his life anew, all while falling under the spell of the place and the people he meets there. As his connection to the art around him grows, so does Patrick, until he gradually emerges… transformed by all the beauty.”
The stage adaptation of All the Beauty in the World was first produced as a special presentation at the 2024 Charleston Literary Festival, in Charleston, S. C. It was there that Bringley met Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London from 2006 to 2016. Bringley said Dromgoole was very enthusiastic about his presentation; Dromgoole eventually did the play’s set design and blocking and was “instrumental in getting the team together.”
Bringley, who began giving tours to groups when he left the Metropolitan Museum in 2019, said he had “given a lot of talks to a lot of museums” and noticed that he was comfortable on stage, and “enjoyed doing this.” He also said his mother, Maureen Gallagher, is a longtime theater actor in Chicago, “so I grew up around this.”
Working as a guard at the Met after his brother’s death appealed to him, he said, because it allowed him to “stand still for a while and think my own thoughts and be around things that seemed very elemental and very beautiful and very painful.” The art grapples “with life and death,” as he was doing personally, he added.
“I am truly humbled by the response to the play and my story,” Bringley said. “It’s a magical feeling in the theater, and people stop me after the show to share their own stories about loss, healing, chosen family and the beauty they find in art and in life. It’s exactly why I wanted to adapt my memoir for the stage.”
Published in 2020, Bringley’s book spent nine weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. It was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Public Library, the Financial Times, Audible, the New York Post, the Sunday Times (London), and others, and has been translated in editions in countries ranging from Italy to Ukraine to South Korea, where it has been a #1 national bestseller.