Brown Wasp, a charming, intimate and insightful one-woman show at the Halifax Fringe Festival, is unusual as it delves into the icky, largely unspoken world of female body experience.

In Meah Martin’s award-winning, 50-minute play, Sarah St. John is an older woman at a spa hoping for a cure in the sacred, healing waters of Little Manitou Lake, Saskatchewan.

The character’s self-deprecating story of many surgeries for “female problems” and her latest health scare is funny, poetic and cathartic for anyone who’s had to lie on a medical table and put their feet into those horrid stirrups.

Martin explores Sarah’s fears about breast cancer, her childhood memories of a loving father and buttoned-up mother, a lifetime of hiding her breasts and her outrage at all the naked women at the spa who come early and take up all the cubicles.

Her fear of illness translates into a fear of entering the lake, where her husband, a kind, straightforward character puzzled by his wife’s turmoil and quick temper, floats happily along. (His needs are simple; he wants to be held and he wants her to make pancakes.)

Martin has wonderful, recurring poetic symbols often echoed in Ali Kahn’s sound design – brown wasps whose knowledge of how to get home lies within their tissues, Sarah’s dream of a community of women, cherry red nail polish.

Winnipeg performer Megan McArton, directed by Alissa Watson, is caustic and comical; she moves from hostile to joyful, from anger to a state of grace. It’s a strong, convincing and transformative performance within a challenging play that requires its actor to quickly set time and place and change tenses and characters. This play has an incandescent ending which McArton does beautifully.

It’s the very ordinariness and down-to-earth character of Sarah St. John that makes her story long linger after she has disappeared from the stage. Does the body hold memory in its very tissues? How are women able to rise above — or at least accept — all the messiness of their bodies to be strong and free?

Brown Wasp is at the Neptune Imperial Room Sept. 6, 7 and 8, 6:30 p.m.; Sept. 9, 6 p.m., and Sept. 10, 5 p.m. (Note: The Halifax Fringe requires that people wear masks indoors.) The tour is: Sept. 14: Kentville at CentreStage Theatre, 7p.m.; Sept. 15, Harbourville at Harbourville Hall, 7p.m.; Sept. 16, Wolfville at Al Whittle Theatre, 7 p.m.; Sept 17, Annapolis Royal, Kings Theatre, 3 p.m.

Annapolis Valley tickets are $15 at showpass.com/caravantheatre and at the door (Annapolis Royal tickets available at kingstheatre.ca). Halifax Fringe tickets are $12.50 available at halifaxfringe.ca (go to the A to Z show list under the box office tab). Visit caravantheatre.ca for more information. The show is recommended for 16 years and up.

Founded by Canadian actress, director and theatre educator Kathy France, Caravan Theatre travelled the world for 11 years setting up home in countries including Trinidad, Yugoslavia, Croatia, Kenya, Syria, Thailand and Nepal. France returned to Canada in 2012 and Wolfville is now home to Caravan Theatre. The company works with theatre, music and dance artists and “seeks to engage its audience’s minds and spirits in theatre that is innovative and inspirational,” according to a press release.

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