Nesting Doll

SYNOPSIS — Nesting Doll

The play unfolds inside and around an Experimental High-Security Correctional Facility (P.S.K.Y.A.), a hybrid of prison, psychiatric hospital, and behavioral research center. Beneath its scientific façade, lies a dystopian mechanism of surveillance, coercion, and institutional corruption.

Angelo, a psychiatrist, lives between two worlds: his marriage to Lily, a well-known journalist, and his work inside the facility, where he becomes increasingly entangled with a seductive colleague, Nina, whose ambition and cynicism match the institution’s moral decay.

During a Christmas Eve dinner with colleagues, casual conversation slowly reveals the disturbing nature of the facility’s “Big Brother” experiment, an enforced, 24/7 surveillance system where inmates are monitored even in their most private moments and “voted out” for behavioral infractions. Lily senses something unsettling behind the joviality, but Angelo keeps its darkest truths hidden.

Inside the Control Room, the psychiatrists monitor inmates as clinical subjects, stripped of privacy and autonomy. Ethical lines blur: medication, ultrasounds, and “wiring” procedures manipulate the prisoners’ physiology and emotions. Angelo attempts to justify the system as humanitarian progress, while Jimmy and Tsakiri struggle with its moral implications. Nina, however, embraces its power structure without hesitation.

Angelo begins an obsessive affair with Nina that spirals into sexual addiction, substance use, and disintegration of judgment. His emotional distance drives Lily to suspect deeper estrangement. As Lily later enters the facility as a journalist, she uncovers hints of abuse, lies, and scientific exploitation, though Nina manipulates her experience, masking the truth behind charm and half-truths.

The turning point comes when Lily unexpectedly undergoes a violent, delirious physical reaction—identical to the inmates’ episodes triggered by ultrasounds. This leads Angelo to a horrifying realization: they, too, are being monitored and manipulated, just like the prisoners. Private life has dissolved; surveillance has extended beyond the facility walls into the supposedly safe domestic sphere.

In a frenzy, Angelo tries to tear his house apart searching for cameras, while Lily swings between terror, thirst, and partial lucidity. Outside, a storm rages as both grasp that they are not observers but subjects in a larger experiment—nested inside layers of control, just like the title suggests.

Convinced they must escape before the system intervenes, Angelo pushes Lily toward the car. Meanwhile, in the Control Room, Nina silently watches everything, the monitors cutting to static at the moment of Angelo’s discovery.

The play ends with Nina making a phone call—implying emergency containment.
The escape attempt is suspended in uncertainty.

The “nesting doll” metaphor reveals itself:
layers of surveillance within layers, humans nested inside institutions, secrets nested within secrets, and private selves dismantled until nothing is left but the gaze of power.

CHARACTER BREAKDOWN

MAIN CHARACTERS

LILY

Profession: Journalist, public figure.
Relationship: Wife of Angelo.
Arc:

• Initially playful, sensual, socially confident.

• Gradually becomes suspicious of the facility and of Angelo’s emotional distance.

• Exposed to the internal mechanisms of P.S.K.Y.A. through Nina’s manipulative tour.

• Ultimately experiences a terrifying physiological episode—proof that she is also a subject of experimentation.

• Represents the outside world’s conscience, truth-seeking, and vulnerability when facing authoritarian systems.

ANGELO

Profession: Psychiatrist; later promoted inside P.S.K.Y.A.
Relationship: Husband of Lily; lover of Nina.
Arc:

• Torn between ambition, guilt, desire, and institutional loyalty.

• Idealizes the research’s humanitarian purpose while ignoring its abuses.

• Becomes entangled with Nina in a destructive sexual and chemical dependency.

• Gradually loses moral direction, then regains clarity only when Lily collapses.

• Realizes too late that he, Lily—and by extension all staff—are subjects of a deeper experiment.
  A tragic figure whose pursuit of status blinds him to the loss of freedom and intimacy.

NINA

Profession: Psychiatrist; ultrasound expert; ambitious rising star.
Relationship: Angelo’s lover; formerly involved with Jimmy.
Arc:

• Seductive, manipulative, opportunistic.

• Embraces the facility’s power dynamics; protects herself through charm and alliances.

• Lies freely, pushes ethical boundaries, and experiments with substances and sexual power.

• Represents internalized totalitarian logic—willing to sacrifice ethics for advancement.
  By the end, she becomes the watchers’ watcher:
  the embodiment of surveillance culture itself.

JIMMY

Profession: Psychiatrist, colleague and friend of Angelo.
Arc:

• Cynical but morally sensitive.

• Struggles with the institution’s direction and his own complicity.

• Jealous, insecure, but more ethically grounded than Nina or Angelo.
  The character who most clearly articulates the philosophical and ethical dilemmas of the system.

MS. TSAKIRI

Profession: Psychiatrist, meticulous and principled.
Arc:

• Gradually cracks under the moral weight of watching inmates stripped of all privacy.

• Provides the strongest ethical resistance within the system.

• Her breakdown reveals the psychological toll of institutionalized voyeurism.
  Represents the human conscience collapsing under unbearable ethical contradictions.

SECONDARY CHARACTERS

PRISONERS

Played by the main actors.
Function:

• Serve as mirrors of the staff’s moral degradation.

• Demonstrate the extreme consequences of constant surveillance and coercive “treatment.”

• Their moments of delirium, hypersexual behavior, and emotional collapse foreshadow what later happens to Lily and Angelo.
  They are the “first layer” of the nesting doll, believed to be the only subjects, until the next layers are revealed.