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Shakespeare Unlimited podcast

Antioch Shakespeare Festival: John Lithgow, Robin Lithgow, and Tony Dallas

Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 99

Over the course of three summers  in the 1950s, Arthur Lithgow and a troupe of actors he’d gathered performed every single one of Shakespeare plays, in rep, at the Antioch Shakespeare Festival, also known as Shakespeare Under the Stars, at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

These performances included the first professional Shakespeare productions of Troilus and Cressida, Pericles, Timon of Athens, and Titus Andronicus in the United States.

The festival, which Lithgow co-created with another young Antioch professor, Meredith Dallas, worked with Antioch students, local amateurs, and young professionals who came in on the train from New York, including Nancy Marchand, Earle Hyman, Laurence Luckinbill, Ellis Rabb, and Kelton Garwood.

This podcast episode brings together the children of the festival’s founders to talk about their fathers’ work and its legacy: 

  • Meredith Dallas’s son, Tony Dallas, an Ohio theater director
  • Arthur Lithgow’s daughter, Robin Lithgow, recently retired as the Coordinator for K-12 Arts Programs in the Los Angeles public schools
  • Arthur Lithgow’s son, John Lithgow, the Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award-winning actor, who recently finished a Broadway run of a one-man show called Stories by Heart, largely about his father

John, Robin, and Tony are interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Listen on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, or NPR One.