The story of opera singer, crossdresser and expert swordfighter Julie d’Aubigny, who lived in France from 1673 to 1707, is the very definition of “stranger than fiction.”

Also known as Madame de Maupin (or, simply, “La Maupin”), d’Aubigny openly flaunted conventions, and French law, and therefore passed into legend.

“Her story cannot be completely verified because of course there was the French Revolution, and records got lost,” explains actress Samantha Marti Parisi, who is portraying La Maupin in a one-woman theatrical show (The Saint of Scandal) at the upcoming Tampa International Fringe Festival.

“So here we are, 300 years later saying ‘OK, here are all these different accounts of deeds attributed to this woman.’ One historian has her listed as killing 10 men, and someone else has the total being much less. They all agree on certain things.”

All accounts – even the dodgy ones – agree that Julie was strikingly beautiful, could sing like a bird (her contralto was heard often at the Paris Opera, which hired her in 1690), and had been trained since childhood to wield a sword.

And she was bisexual, before the word was coined. She set fire to a convent in Avignon in order to spring her young lover, and was in absentia charged with arson (La Maupin had returned to Paris and was never tried).

It’s Parisi’s third one-woman show in the course of a year. She played political satirist Molly Ivins in Red Hot Patriot at Clearwater’s TheatreFor, and followed it with The Pink Unicorn for Story Keepers; in that production, she inhabited conservative Texas widow Trisha Lee, who has discovered, to her horror, that her teen daughter is exploring her sexuality.

“I did not ever see myself doing solo performances,” Parisi explains. “But I wanted to do Red Hot Patriot because of the political climate. Because of Molly’s words, I really felt like that piece needed to be out in our community. People needed to hear her wisdom. That was as far as I thought this was going to go.”

Parisi began making notes, conducting research and writing outlines for what would eventually become Extraordinary Voices and Extraordinary Tales, a series of one-person, one-act plays in which she “becomes” an essentially unsung woman from history.

She is currently booking these shows, 15 different ones, at school, libraries, cultural festivals and even on cruise ships.

And that’s how her immersive Julie d’Aubigny tale was born.

“I have a list on my phone of people that I find really fascinating,” Parisi says. “She was one of the people I’d come across in reading somewhere, and I thought ‘Oh, that can’t possibly be true.’ And then I started doing research, and fell down a rabbit hole one night. And I was like ‘I can’t believe this woman. Why isn’t there a major motion picture about her?’”

Because so much of d’Aubigny’s history exists in a grey area, Parisi subtitled her show The True(ish) Story of La Maupin. “I took the pieces that I found to be the most interesting,” she explains.

“Overall, it pays homage to her life. It is the basic arc of her life. They say she passed away in a convent, repenting for her quote-unquote sins … who’s to say? So I took that and decided to leave the ending open-ended. Because I don’t see her as just flaming out and disappearing.”

The Tampa International Fringe Festival is an annual celebration of alternative theater, held at Kress Contemporary and The Commodore on 7th Avenue in Ybor City. There are more than 30 shows on the June 10-21 schedule. Find the full schedule, and purchase tickets, at this link.

Running approximately 55 minutes, The Saint of Scandal will be performed June 12, 13, 14, 15 and 21.

“The story of La Maupin really is very Fringe forward,” Parisi says. “It seems like the perfect spot for her to make her debut.”