The Great Depression / Velika depresija

Premiered at the Serbian National Theatre under the direction of Marko Čelebić, the play places the social context at the very center of its dramatic focus, making it one of the key protagonists. Drawing on true events and setting his drama in New York and America of the 1930s, Filip Grujić presents a portrait of modern civilization—one poisoned equally by its exploitative nature and by the superficiality, sterility, and self-destructive emptiness of the individuals who inhabit it.

The Great Depression, photo: Promo/Dejan Petrović

In The Great Depression, two narrative threads intertwine with striking effect. The first follows the fate of Eben Byers, the wealthy son of an industrialist—a playboy and hedonist (and, incidentally, the U.S. amateur golf champion of 1906)—whose illness and death resulted from prolonged treatment with a radioactive tonic called Radithor, prescribed by the obscure and fashionable Dr. Bailey. Grujić elevates this subject far beyond the level of the cliché “the rich also cry,” offering instead a compelling psychological portrait that verges on allegory, while juxtaposing it with the broader socio-moral scandal of 1930s America.

That scandal centers on the tragedy of the “radium girls” — poor young women from New Jersey and Illinois who died during the same period while working in factories that used radium to paint watch dials. Following company instructions meant to save materials, they were told to “refresh” their brushes by moistening them with their lips (“lip, dip, paint”), unknowingly exposing themselves to deadly doses of radiation over years of work. Wealthy factory owners and a complicit press successfully silenced any major public outcry over their suffering. In contrast, the death of millionaire Eben Byers was enough to prompt the banning of Radithor and to halt broader applications of radioactivity.

The greater part of the drama (what older critics might call the “main plot”) unfolds within the Byers family, while the tragic fate of the “radium girls” is evoked through a five-member chorus that functions as a recurring dramatic motif. Eben’s illness—caused by Dr. Bailey’s Radithor treatment, prescribed to heal a minor elbow injury sustained during one of the hero’s many extramarital escapades—serves not only as the narrative’s catalyst, but also as a metaphorical trigger for Grujić’s parable about the intimate connection between personal emptiness and social parasitism.