THE YEAR OF EXTRAORDINARY TRAVEL Comes to Studio Grand Central

This December, Studio Grand Central will present the world premiere of a new solo show by award-winning actress Becca McCoy. The Year of Extraordinary Travel will have a nine-performance run at the new St. Petersburg performance space from December 8-18, 2022.

Becca McCoy's real-life experience of traveling somewhere every month for a year becomes a theatrical event - exploring relationships, memory, and how we fill the spaces between the "no longer" and the "not yet." With The Year of Extraordinary Travel, she returns to a Tampa Bay area stage for the first time in three years.

The Year of Extraordinary Travel was originally published in book form in 2021 by the St. Petersburg Press. The 138-page hardcover travelogue chronicles September 2018 through August 2019, during which time Becca McCoy traveled to eight states in the US and seven other countries with five different travel companions and sometimes alone. The Year of Extraordinary Travel contains short tales and hundreds of photos celebrating the relationship-deepening, horizon-expanding, joy-inducing nature of travel, and the beauty of our diverse earth and common humanity.

Directed by Vickie Daignault, the play integrates literature and photography into traditional solo performance. "Especially after the pandemic stopped us from congregating for collective listening, I wanted to honor and explore the various ways we tell, and hear, our stories," Becca McCoy explains, "and using the book as both source material and theatrical element allows for variety in how the audience is guided through the story."

"As a theatre director," says Vickie Daignault, "I see every new project "in technicolor", almost cinematically. Because of the vivid detail in Becca's stories of these extraordinary locations, this project has lots of opportunities to envelop the audience in the sights and sounds of her experiences. I wanted to be a part of the emotional transfer of those experiences from the page to the stage."

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