I. The dolls wait in the wings like a council of abandoned promises. Each is threaded with its own inventory of repairs: cracked smiles, one glass eye, a sleeve hem mended with a floss of hair. They don costumes stitched from yesterday’s headlines and yesterday’s feelings, and they know the choreography of want by rote. The show is a ritual economy where admission is not just coin but consent to witness ruin and make it pretty.