Interview: Samantha Martí-Parisi of THE SAINT OF SCANDAL

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 Samantha Parisi, she steps into the firelit, glitter stained life of Julie d’Aubigny, 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.

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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. “The 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.” 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.

In shaping the script, Parisi followed what she calls the emotional truth. “The facts gave me the structure. The theatre lived in the spaces between them.” 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. “I 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.”

Julie’s duels are handled with the same clarity. Parisi was not interested in turning her into a superhero. “What 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.” The result is a portrait of a woman who fought not for glory but for the right to exist on her own terms.

Her relationships are portrayed with grounded tenderness. Parisi refuses to sensationalize them. “Julie’s relationships were not shocking to her. They were simply part of how she moved through the world.” 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.

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. “One moment you are in spectacle. The next you are in strategy. That is the Opera. That is Julie.” 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?

After living inside Julie’s world for so long, Parisi hopes audiences leave with a sense of connection to a queer ancestor who refused to dim herself. “History 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.” 

History called Julie d’Aubigny scandalous. Parisi’s play suggests she was simply living her truth in a century that had no language for her.

Performances:  

• June 12th at 7PM  
• June 13th at 10:15PM  
• June 14th at 7:30PM  
• June 15th at 7:15PM  
• June 21st at 3:30PM  

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