Obituaries

Arthur Lithgow

Arthur Lithgow ’38 , Antioch alumnus and former faculty member, died March 23, at the age of 88. The cause was congestive heart failure, his son, the actor John Lithgow, was quoted as saying in an obituary in The New York Times on March 25.

Arthur Washington Lithgow III was born on Sept. 9, 1915, in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, the son of Arthur Washington Lithgow II and Ina Berenice Robinson Lithgow. His family had a sugar business in the Dominican Republic and then ran an electric utility in Puerto Rico.

In 1935, while still a student at Antioch, he founded the Antioch Summer Theater. He graduated from Antioch with a BA in 1938. While at Antioch he met Sarah Jane Price, an actress, whom he married in 1939. He also received an MA in playwriting at Cornell University in 1948.

Lithgow was an assistant professor of dramatics at Antioch from 1947 to 1956. In 1952 he founded the Antioch Shakespeare Festival, which was later renamed Shakespeare Under the Stars. Set on an elaborate, multilevel stage behind Antioch’s Main Building, the festivals featured all of Shakespeare’s plays. Though the festival got off to a slow start, people eventually started to turn out, and by the end of its five-season run, more than 135,000 people had attended. The festival stopped being produced at Antioch when Lithgow left the College. The festival moved to Lakewood, near Cleveland, and continued as the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.

While at Antioch, Lithgow also starred as Horace Mann, the college’s first president, in A Testament of Faith, a play about Mann written by Antioch faculty.

In 1981, Lithgow returned to Antioch to complete some unfinished business and direct the full version of Henry IV, which has three parts performed over three nights. Lithgow had produced the abridged version of the play in the ’50s for Antioch’s Shakespeare festival.

Lithgow also served as the artistic director of the McCarter Theater in Princeton and worked at the Brattleboro Center for the Performing Arts in Vermont, at the University of South Florida in Tampa and in Ithaca, New York, where he co-founded the Ithaca Theater Guild.