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Meet the MFA Student Lighting Designer: Gregory C. Brenchley
Brenchley Illumninates The Mistakes of a Night
by Tom Shafer
 Third –year MFA student lighting designer Gregory C. Brenchley comes from American Forks, Utah, and did his undergraduate work at Utah State. He has created lighting designs for the IU theatre and Drama productions of Falsettos; The Scarlet Letter; Happy Birthday, Wanda June; and The Alien from Cincinnati . For his M.F.A. thesis project Greg has created and is implementing a lighting design for She Stoops to Conquer.
When Oliver Goldsmith wrote the play, he employed conventions and characters that were at least 100 years old, originating from the days when British Restoration comedy played city against country, aligning itself with the sophistication, style, and wit of the city. Such comic heroes as Horner in The Country Wife or Dorimant in The Man of Mode lived by their wit, took pleasure where they might, and had great fun at the expense of naïve innocents from the country, like Mrs. Pinchwife, the country wife of Wycherley's comedy, who wished to embrace the latest fashion of London; or they mocked the would-be sophisticates, like Sir Fopling Flutter, Etherege's man of mode, who aspired (yet failed) to be accomplished wits and stylistic trend-setters.
In She Stoops to Conquer Goldsmith employs variants of these stock figures, yet he creates a balance that was missing from the Restoration plays. In Mrs. Hardcastle Goldsmith still finds ambitions for sophistication and fashion, ill-placed as it may be. Yet her son Tony Lumpkin and her husband are quite at ease with themselves and their country life; they have little need to go to London or embrace the latest fashions and style. Goldsmith, then, populates his countryside with characters of both stripes, the “traditional” comic figure of Mrs. Hardcastle, who wants to abandon the country and embrace the city, and Tony Lumpkin and Mr.Hardcastle, who are happy to be who and where they are.
With Goldsmith's young lovers, the city no longer trumps the country. The city lovers, Hastings and Constance, may love one another, but their scenes often exhibit a severely artificial sense of speech and manners. They embody to the extreme the sentimental style so popular in late eighteenth-century comedy.
The other pair of lovers involves Marlow, a young aristocrat from the city, and Kate Hardcastle, a sophisticated woman of the country. As he courts Kate, Marlow wages an internal battle within himself, for he is a gentleman who is completely and awkwardly shy around cultured young women of his own social rank,; yet he is open and free, suggestive and sensual with “females of another class, you know.”
Marlow has been sent to the Hardcastle home to meet and court Kate, who is the most levelheaded of the play's characters. Kate is a country woman who is also familiar with the city, where she and Constance are friends. To please her father, she spends part of the day dressed in a simple country dress, acting as steward to the house; the rest of the day, she indulges her taste for the very latest in London fashion. At ease in both roles, she comfortably balances both the city and the country.
Kate meets Marlow in both of these roles and finds he behaves quite differently, according to which costume she is wearing. He is a stammering mess when he formally courts the well-dressed, cosmopolitan Kate Hardcastle, but he is a lively and interesting would-be lover when he believes he's flirting with a mere servant. One of the major journeys of the play involves Marlow's coming to terms with Kate as a person, and in so doing, finding his own balance, his own sense of himself as a man and as Kate's lover.
Greg Brenchley's lighting design carefully follows these different characters and their actions, trying to reflect the sense of realism and authenticity in some scenes and to highlight the pretentiousness of the action in others. Greg decided that the fill light for the scenes might support the underlying actions: he found a warm “country” fill of soft light to use in scenes that were more or less authentic and honest; and he decided to use a cool, stark, “platinum” fill for scenes that were more “urban,” wherein people might aspire to a pretentious, upper-class status.
“The contrast is there right from the beginning,” Greg says. “The first scene is dominated by Mrs. Hardcastle's seeking out the latest in fashions and trying to get her husband to take her to London, ‘to town now and then, to rub off the rust a little.' The lighting that supports this scene is some of the coolest in the play.
“We immediately follow with the most honest and self-accepting scene in the play, Tony Lumpkin in his element at the Three Pigeons alehouse, singing with his friends, holding forth with entertaining stories, and having fun with the city visitors. So this will have some of the warmest light in the show.
“The rest of the play is a mixture of honesty and pretentiousness, and the lighting, too, is designed to reflect this mixture, this combination of two worlds.” And if the audience perceives the contrasting worlds inhabited by these characters, much of the credit will go to Greg Brenchley's success in meeting the challenge of his M.F.A. lighting design thesis.
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