He appeared in student productions at
Antioch College, where he founded the Antioch Summer Theater in 1935 and where he received his BA in 1938. He made his New York City debut in November 1938, as a soldier in Jacques Deval's anti-Nazi drama,
Lorelei. A nomad all his life, Lithgow was in
Rochester, New York near the end of World War II, where he appeared in amateur productions such as the glib cockney scoundrel in an amateur production of the English comic melodrama
Ladies in Retirement, produced by the
Rochester Community Players. Lithgow received his MA from
Cornell University on playwriting in 1948 and served as assistant professor of dramatics at Antioch from 1947 to 1956. He first began directing Shakespeare at
Antioch College in 1952, when he became the Founder and Artistic Director of the Antioch Shakespeare Festival, or "Shakespeare under the Stars," as it came to be known. Within a period of six years, this festival produced all of the works of Shakespeare, bringing the attention and praise of even the Queen of the United Kingdom. In 1958, he moved to Northern Ohio as Executive Director of
Stan Hywet Hall in
Akron, Ohio. He appeared on Broadway in
A Cure for Matrimony,
Steel and the musical
Lorelei (which starred
Carol Channing and was based on
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). In 1963, he became executive director of the
McCarter Theatre at
Princeton University, a position he held until 1972, when he and his family relocated to
Boston, where he was a visiting professor at the
University of Massachusetts Boston. He served as administrative director of the Brattleboro Center for the Performing Arts in
Brattleboro, Vermont. In 1976, he became a Visiting Associate Professor of the Theatre Arts at the University of South Florida at Tampa. While there he began directing the Alice People Theatre. ==Personal life==