Date of Award
5-2026
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts - English
Department
English
First Advisor
Dr. John McDermott
Second Advisor
Dr. Steve Marsden
Third Advisor
Dr. Sara Parks
Fourth Advisor
Dr. Anne Smith
Abstract
The Incredible Is is a full-length philosophical play in two acts that follows Self — a man whose body contains the visible cosmos — as he travels existence with his companion Cosmic Cat in search of his creator, the "Ultimate Personifier." Along the way he encounters personified abstractions including You, Them, We, Power, Pleasure and Pain, Creator and Destroyer, and falls in love with Magic. When his obsession with finding his maker leads him to break the Rules and plunge the universe into chaos, God resets reality and Self at last confronts the Ultimate Personifier — only to discover a playwright in an East Texas coffee shop, working out old heartbreak and a stay in a psychiatric hospital through the very script Self inhabits. Drawing on the traditions of philosophical vaudeville, absurdist drama, and meta-theater, the play stages questions about creation, free will, loss, and the relationship between a maker and what is made, and closes on the proposition that "we are all but words."
Repository Citation
Hughes, Justin L., "The Incredible Is" (2026). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 700.
https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/etds/700
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
