Theatre in Review: All the Beauty in the World (DR2 Theatre)

	Patrick Bringley. Photo: Joan Marcus

It's interesting (to me, anyway) how many notes I take at any given production. Some earn a few scribbles; others produce reams. This has nothing to do with quality, I think, but sometimes it can be revealing. For example, the 75-minute-long All the Beauty in the World generated a set of jottings almost as long as Patrick Bringley's script. I wasn't expecting that.

There are two reasons for this. Bringley, also the star of this solo piece, talks about his job as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One imagines that standing around for eight to 12 hours (depending on the day) might be the dullest of occupations, even in the presence of great art, but, counterintuitively, All the Beauty in the World contains some of the most graceful writing I've heard all season.

The Met, Bringley notes, is a city unto itself: "There's a wood shop and a Plexiglas shop, an armory with a working forge for when medieval helmets go on the fritz," as well as a tailor shop manned by a character named Johnny Buttons. Of his colleagues, he notes, "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." We also get tips on marathon standing ("Hands together, fleshy part at the tailbone. Legs out about thirty degrees. Ankles crossed.") and the art of museum-guard naps ("On a locker room bench. Feet together. Arms crossed in the manner of an Egyptian pharaoh. Clip on tie draped across the eyes.") In neither case, we are assured, the technology has never been improved upon.

Bringley's comments on the art surrounding him bristle with pleasures, aided by Austin Switser's projections. Commenting on a Tintoretto, he says, of Venice, "An impossible city, a chain of 118 wave-lapped islands that in the 16th century, boasted the brightest and richest colors in the world. Ultramarine from Afghanistan, azurite from Egypt, vermilion from Spain." Noting the revolutionary nature of Pieter Bruegel's The Harvesters, he says, "It is just the world that Bruegel saw around him in the 16th-century Low Countries, and it took a Renaissance for an artist to notice it and paint it." Taken with the intensive detail of a carpet woven in Cairo in the 16th century, he says, "You read a thing like that on a museum label, and every single word contains its own infinity. This little word 'Egypt'...It is everything there is and ever was along the fertile banks of the Nile." Whatever the drawbacks, a job that allows room for such thoughts is a great privilege.

But my copious notes were also an attempt to divine a strong throughline that would weave all these insights into a coherent pattern. It is there, but you have to look for it. Deeply affected by the death of his brother, an academic researcher in his twenties, Bringley threw over his job as a special events coordinator at The New Yorker to flee "the galloping world," and seek refuge at the Met. It's an impulse one can almost grasp, but, considering that it rests at the show's heart, it's surprising he doesn't delve into it more. There's an especially poignant section featuring his brother's last meal -- Chicken McNuggets, as it happens -- and a pretty amusing story about ushering Michael Chabon and Stephen King around a New Yorker event, ending with the admission that he has read neither author. But Bringley often skirts the more difficult and personal aspects of his story.

Bringley talks about marriage and children, the happy chaos of his home life marking a stark contrast to the quietude of the Met (even with stray tourists pelting him with questions like, "Do you guys have any Mona Lisas?"). There is a kind of implied narrative involving his brother's death; his immersion at the Met, allowing for years of contemplation; and a gradual return to the mess and noise of real life. But this underlying structure is not fully articulated. All the Beauty in the World is often charming and frequently illuminating, but it is never urgent. It's an essay rather than a drama, and your enjoyment of such a brief, yet rambling, entertainment is likely to vary.

To his credit, the director, Dominic Drumgoole, hasn't tried to oversell this modest project. His set, consisting of two benches and three picture frames, is simplicity itself; Abigail Hoke Brady's lighting and Caleb S. Garner's sound design are discreetly efficient. Switser's images are ravishingly colorful, especially Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride, about which Van Gogh said, "I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food." Switser's work makes you see what Van Gogh meant.

Bringley is not a polished performer, but he comes alive onstage, and he works well with individual audience members during a participation gag. Less a dynamic evening of theatre and more a cause for reflection, All the Beauty in the World contains many lovely things, not all of them paintings. If you're looking for a quiet, thoughtful evening out, this may be the ticket. --David Barbour