If you’re Becca McCoy, you take off in every direction for a year, publish a book about your travels and then cobble together a one-person show and multimedia experience from it all.
And that’s how “The Year of Extraordinary Travel”—which runs at St. Petersburg’s Studio Grand Central on select nights through Dec. 18—came together. Local theater’s beloved prodigal daughter tells her travel tales through visually aided and theatrical storytelling Dec. 8-18 at the Studio Grand Central in St. Petersburg.
The world-premiere event follows the release of McCoy’s photojournal, “The Year of Extraordinary Travel,” first published in 2021 by the St. Petersburg Press. The 138-page book chronicles trips taken from September 2018-August 2019 across eight states in the U.S. and seven other countries with five different travel companions and sometimes alone.
According to McCoy, 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.”
The new production integrates literature and photography into a solo performance format. Director Vicki Daignault brings both personal and professional experience with the one-person show process. She shepherds McCoy in her storytelling and visuals, helping her strike a balance between intimacy and fascination.
“Vicki (Daignault) is extraordinary at helping me see things that I can’t,” McCoy said, adding that Daignault helped her create a truly singular experience—a reckoning with life experiences vs. expectations, relationships, memory, and “how we fill the spaces between the no longer and the not yet.”
“The Year of Extraordinary Travel” also marks McCoy’s first performance on a Tampa Bay-area stage for the first time in three years.
In the show, she describes “full-on glamping in a heated dome next to a yurt with an executive chef” in Alaska, what it was like to travel with her adolescent daughter to New Zealand and how her relationship with life partner Justin Groom developed over the course of their various trips together. (Spoiler alert: They now run a fine art studio together in Atlanta.)
An openness to living in the moment pervades each of the stories as well as evolving toward a humbling awareness.
“In Myanmar in particular, where I basically knew how to say hello and thank you in Burmese, people were so kind,” McCoy said. “I took photographs of people more than I ever have before because they were just warm and compelling, and it just gave me so much to think about.”
McCoy is emphatic that the journeys changed her, lending a natural arc to her narrative. The first tale, she said, is “a kind of this name-droppy story” about seeing Ian McKellen live, and the journey ends with her in Asia alone, sitting with her own ignorance realizing that the journey as a human being is what’s really extraordinary.
“What exactly is extraordinary?” she asks rhetorically. “Is it extraordinary to go to 12 places in 12 months, or is it the deepening of your connection with yourself and the people around you or the world at large?”
As for the skeptics, McCoy acknowledges that the prospect of dropping everything to travel the world sounds as frightening as it is exhilarating, and she told Creative Loafing Tampa Bay that the sale of her home allowed it all to happen.
“Wonders unveil themselves to us in life when we are guided by the belief and possibility that when you believe that everything is going to work out, it kind of usually does,” McCoy said. “A flight getting canceled and ending up in the airport for eight hours and getting to a destination later than expected adds the extraordinary aspect to the rest of the story to follow.”
Indeed, philosophical and philanthropic intentions underlie McCoy’s narratives as well as a hope that spreading the gospel of global awareness will remediate our sense of hopelessness and isolation.
“When you end up somewhere like Thailand, flying in a metal tube for 24 hours and then landing someplace alone where people don’t speak your language or you don’t speak their language, things look different. People have different customs, and it’s a very vulnerable thing. I think that Americans in particular should go through that experience.”
This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2022.