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The ideal candidate is proactive, curious, and eager to learn. This role is perfect for a student exploring nonprofit arts, communications, marketing, or arts administration, and who enjoys supporting creative projects behind the scenes.<\/p>\n\ud83c\udfad NEW! Tampa Theatre Newsletter<\/p>\n
Tampa Fringe is about to welcome a queer ancestor who has been waiting three centuries to walk back into the room. In The Saint of Scandal written and performed by\u00a0Samantha Parisi, she steps into the firelit, glitter stained life of Julie d\u2019Aubigny, a woman who loved who she loved, fought who she needed to fight, and refused to apologize for any of it. The piece is part reclamation, part resurrection, and part love letter to a queer lineage that has always existed even when history tried to tidy it away.<\/p>\n
\ud83c\udfad NEW! Tampa Theatre Newsletter<\/p>\n
The ideal candidate is proactive, curious, and eager to learn. This role is perfect for a student exploring nonprofit arts, communications, marketing, or arts administration, and who enjoys supporting creative projects behind the scenes.<\/p>\n
What drewParisi in was not the scandal but the contradictions. Julie was adored and condemned, mythologized and misunderstood, and still somehow impossible to pin down. Parisi leaned into that complexity. \u201cThe contradictions are the story. She has been rewritten so many times. Sometimes she is a villain. Sometimes she is a folk hero. I did not want to solve her. I wanted to let her be all of it.\u201d The gaps in the record became part of the point, a reminder of how queer lives are often reshaped by people who never lived them.<\/p>\n
In shaping the script, Parisi followed what she calls the emotional truth. \u201cThe facts gave me the structure. The theatre lived in the spaces between them.\u201d That approach guided her through moments like the convent fire, a story that has been sensationalized for centuries. Parisi refused to treat it as spectacle. \u201cI wanted it to be a choice. A risky, impulsive, deeply human choice made in the name of love. That is more interesting than asking if it literally happened.\u201d<\/p>\n
Julie\u2019s duels are handled with the same clarity. Parisi was not interested in turning her into a superhero. \u201cWhat mattered to me was where she was. These were spaces she was not supposed to be in. The duels are not about counting victories. They are about what it meant for her to stand her ground.\u201d The result is a portrait of a woman who fought not for glory but for the right to exist on her own terms.<\/p>\n
Her relationships are portrayed with grounded tenderness. Parisi refuses to sensationalize them. \u201cJulie\u2019s relationships were not shocking to her. They were simply part of how she moved through the world.\u201d Treating them as ordinary makes them feel more intimate and more recognizably queer. It also allows the audience to see Julie not as a legend but as a person who loved boldly and without apology.<\/p>\n
The Paris Opera becomes a world of beauty and danger, glamour and politics, and Parisi travels through it with the quick shifts of a solo performer who understands both the seduction of the stage and the tension behind it. \u201cOne moment you are in spectacle. The next you are in strategy. That is the Opera. That is Julie.\u201d Throughout the process she found herself returning to questions that resonate deeply within queer communities. Who gets to define a life? Who gets to tell the story? Who gets remembered?<\/p>\n
After living inside Julie\u2019s world for so long, Parisi hopes audiences leave with a sense of connection to a queer ancestor who refused to dim herself. \u201cHistory is more complicated and far more interesting than we are often taught. And Julie reminds me that so much of our identity is performance. Not in a false way. In a choosing way.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
History called Julie d\u2019Aubigny scandalous. Parisi\u2019s play suggests she was simply living her truth in a century that had no language for her.<\/p>\n
Performances:\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tJune 12th at 7PM\u00a0\u00a0
\n\tJune 13th at 10:15PM\u00a0\u00a0
\n\tJune 14th at 7:30PM\u00a0\u00a0
\n\tJune 15th at 7:15PM\u00a0\u00a0
\n\tJune 21st at 3:30PM\u00a0\u00a0
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\n 2026 Theater Fans’ Choice Awards – Live Stats\n <\/p>\n \n Best Off-Broadway Play – Top 3\n <\/p>\n \n 1. \n 7.8% of votes\n <\/p>\n \n 2. \n 5.9% of votes\n <\/p>\n \n 3. \n 4.6% of votes\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n A twice-published author, multi-time award-winning playwright, magazine writer, theatre reviewer, and newspaper journalist with 30+ years in journalism and business copywriting, Deb is not one to shy … (read more about this author)<\/a><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n
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