Early life and theatre
Lloyd was born Norman Nathan Perlmutter on November 8, 1914, in Jersey City, New Jersey. His family was Jewish and lived in New York City. His father, Max Perlmutter, was an accountant who later became a salesman and proprietor of a furniture store. His mother, Sadie Horowitz Perlmutter, was a bookkeeper and housewife. She had a good voice and a lifelong interest in the theatre, and she took her young son to singing and dancing lessons. He had two sisters, Ruth and Janice, who survived her brother by four months. Lloyd became a child performer, appearing at vaudeville benefits and women's clubs, and was a professional by the age of nine.
Lloyd graduated from high school when he was 15 and began studies at New York University, but left at the end of his sophomore year. "All around me I could see the way the Depression was affecting everyone; for my family, for people in business like my father, it was a terrible time," he wrote. "I just wasn't going to stay in college, paying tuition to get a degree to be a lawyer, when I could see lawyers who had become taxi drivers." Lloyd's father died in 1945, at age 55, "broken by the world that he was living in."
In 1932, at age 17, Lloyd auditioned and became the youngest of the apprentices under the direction of May Sarton at Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory Theatre in New York City. He then joined Sarton's Apprentice Theatre in New Hampshire, continuing his studies with her and her associate, Eleanor Flexner. The group rehearsed a total of ten modern European plays and performed at The New School for Social Research and in Boston. Members of the Harvard Dramatic Club saw Lloyd on stage and offered him the lead in a play directed by Joseph Losey. He rejoined Sarton's group, for whom Losey directed a Boston production of Gods of the Lightning. When Sarton was forced to give up her company, Losey suggested that Lloyd audition for a production of André Obey's Noah (1935). It was Lloyd's first Broadway show.
Through Losey, Lloyd became involved in the social theatre of the 1930s, beginning with an acting collective called The Theatre of Action. The group was preparing a production of Michael Blankfort's The Crime (1936),
directed by Elia Kazan. One of the company members was Peggy Craven, who would later become Lloyd's wife.
Losey brought Lloyd into the Federal Theatre Project — which Lloyd called "one of the great theaters of all time"— and its Living Newspapers, which dramatized contemporary events. They initially prepared Ethiopia, about the Italian invasion, which was deemed too controversial and was terminated. The first completed presentation was Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), followed by Injunction Granted (1936) and Power (1937).
When Orson Welles and John Houseman left the Federal Theatre Project to form their own independent repertory theatre company, the Mercury Theatre, Lloyd was invited to become a charter member. He played a memorable role in its first stage production, Caesar (1937), Welles's modern-dress adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy Julius Caesar — streamlined into an anti-fascist tour-de-force. In a scene that became the fulcrum of the show, Cinna the Poet (Lloyd) dies at the hands not of a mob but of a secret police force. Lloyd called it "an extraordinary scene [that] gripped the audience in a way that the show stopped for about three minutes. The audience stopped it with applause. It showed the audience what fascism was; rather than an intellectual approach, you saw a physical one."
The Mercury prepared The Shoemaker's Holiday to go into repertory with Caesar beginning in January 1938. During the December 25 performance of Caesar — when the sets, lighting, and costumes for Shoemaker were ready but no previews had been held — Welles asked the cast if they cared to present a surprise preview immediately after the show. He invited the audience to stay and watch the set changes, and the curtain rose at 1:15 a.m. Lloyd recalled it as "the wildest triumph imaginable. The show was a smash during its run — but never again did we have a performance like that one."
Lloyd performed on the first of four releases in the Mercury Text Records series, phonographic recordings of Shakespeare plays adapted for educators by Welles and Roger Hill. The Merchant of Venice features Lloyd in the roles of Salanio and Launcelot Gobbo. Released on Columbia Masterworks Records in 1939, the recording was reissued on CD in 1998.
Lloyd played the role of Johnny Appleseed in Everywhere I Roam (1938), a play by Arnold Sundgaard that was developed by the Federal Theatre Project and staged on Broadway by Marc Connelly. "It was a lovely experience, although the play failed," Lloyd recalled. "For me, it was a success; in those days, before the Tony Awards, the critics' Ten Best Performers list at the end of the year was the greatest recognition. For my performance, I was selected to be on the list by the critics."
