All the Beauty in the World is a solo performance piece by playwright and performer Patrick Bringley, who talks about 10 years working as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The projection shows a detail from The Harvesters, a 1564 painting by Peter Breughel the Elder.
“Grief is among other things a loss of rhythm,” remarks Patrick Bringley in All the Beauty in the World. This one-performer drama, now on the miniature stage of DR2, is based on Bringley’s 2023 memoir of the same title. Both play and memoir explore the emotional life of a man in his mid-20s, sensitive and erudite, seeking solace in art and isolation following his older brother’s death. When “you lose someone, it puts a hole in your life,” says Bringley (making his theatrical debut playing himself), “and for a time you huddle down in that hole.”
In transforming his memoir All the Beauty in the World into a theater piece, Bringley has worked with English director and writer Dominic Dromgoole, who is also responsible for the play’s simple, effective scenic design.
At the play’s outset, Patrick is employed at The New Yorker, where he’s on the team that produces the annual New Yorker Festival. When his brother Tom, a PhD candidate working at the juncture of biology and mathematics, is stricken with a fast-moving form of cancer, the Bringleys—Patrick, his parents, sister, and sister-in-law—pull together to support and care for him. Two years later, after Tom dies, Patrick recoils from the hard-striving, anxiety-ridden world of magazine-brand promotion. “I had lost someone,” he says. “I did not wish to move on from that. In a sense, I didn’t wish to move at all.”
That’s where the play begins, with Patrick stepping away from the chaos of New York City professional life to become a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The compensation is modest, but the job lets him contemplate the Met’s treasures to his heart’s content while simultaneously searching his own soul. The long hours “in a place that seem[s] uniquely untouched by the rhythms of the everyday” suit him well, and he stays at the museum for 10 years.
In theory, a staged memoir performed entirely by an untried actor is unpromising. All the Beauty in the World, however, has a notable advantage in having been directed by Dominic Dromgoole. He is one of England’s most distinguished stage directors and, from 2006 to 2016, was artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank of the Thames in London. He has worked closely with Bringley since this project was put together for last year’s Charleston Literary Festival in South Carolina. The result of their collaboration is a production that combines a lean, shapely script with an authentic solo performance by Bringley that’s at once low-key and compelling.
Dromgoole also serves as designer of the production’s uncomplicated, eye-appealing environment, which features benches recognizable from visits to the Met and three screens for Austin Switser’s effective projections of items from the museum’s collection. While the script steers clear of being an art history class, it includes commentary—perspicacious and accessible to playgoers of almost any age or background—on visual details of works projected periodically on the screens.
Bringley’s autobiographical play explores how he reconnected with “the rhythms of the everyday” after the disorienting early death of his brother. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
In the play’s 90 minutes, Patrick grapples with his emotional damage from spending “the better part of two years sitting by hospital beds.” He becomes a husband and father; and he begins to appreciate the diversity of his fellow guards—their varied ages, origins, backgrounds, and interests. He discovers that “no particular type of person sets out in life to become a museum guard, so countless types take on the role, each marching to their own drummer.” And he realizes that his fellow museum employees are treasures in their own right.
Bringley’s script is so serenely insightful and Dromgoole’s direction so restrained that it’s easy to underestimate this production’s profundity. It’s also possible to mistake the piece for a drama principally about grief and loss (which would be an unfortunate misreading). Consistent with life itself, All the Beauty in the World contains a certain amount of sorrow; but the play’s most significant sentiment is summed up in a classical Indian text, attributed inconclusively to the poet Kalidasa, who was active during the Gupta Dynasty of the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. “Look to this day,” writes the Sanskrit poet, “For it is life, the very life of life. … For yesterday is but a dream / And tomorrow is only a vision; / And today well-lived makes / Yesterday a dream of happiness / And every tomorrow a vision of hope.” Bringley’s current presence on the New York stage is evidence that, after leaving the Met, he has rejoined the busy world, once again in sync with its rhythms, and bringing with him wisdom from those 10 restorative years of reflection and change.
All the Beauty in the World plays through May 25 at DR2 Theatre (103 E. 16th St.). Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, and at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday and at 3 p.m. Sunday (except on April 20, which has a 2 p.m. matinee and a special 6 p.m. performance). For tickets and information, visit allthebeautyintheworldplay.com.
Playwright: Patrick Bringley
Direction & Scenic Design: Dominic Dromgoole
Lighting Design: Abigail Hoke-Brady
Sound Design: Caleb S. Garner
Projection Design: Austin Switser
