GOD NOSE
Our hero finds himself at odds with his society when, on the morning before he is to be married, his false nose mysteriously rises off his face as he sleeps and levitates into the flies. (A minor miracle that is never really explained.) Moments later Lug awakens from uneasy dreams to discover to his horror that his nose has disappeared. After a quick search of his apartment, Lug realizes he has become a social outcast. And worse still, he has to flee underground, because having no false nose is a capital offense.
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While this may sound like a promising enough premise for a dark, absurdist play, in playwright Kim Curlee’s less than capable hands, what might have been an interesting one-act is instead a tedious 90-minute play.
Curlee is much better at fattening up his story line, padding out the dialogue with the pseudo-Shakespearean doggerel that only stoned undergraduates would consider “deep.” (“Speak to me of what I don’t know so I can speak with like surprise.”) Every once in a while, in spite of himself, Curlee writes a genuinely interesting bit of dialogue, such as when Lug greets the morning sun with “So another day has begun as it always begins, at the beginning.” But most of the time, Curlee’s characters only manage to say in ten words what they could have said in five.
