ABOUT THE SHOW...
Burn Scar: A Comedy of Catastrophic Proportions is a solo show written and performed by Christine Dunford, drawn from her experience evacuating from the January 2025 Palisades fire, and the eighteen months of displacement, insurance battles --and unexpected grace that followed.
Burn Scar played to sold out houses at the 2026 Hollywood Fringe Festival, where it was named one of ten
Los Angeles Magazine's shows "not to be missed."
Running time: 55 minutes
Content Note
Mature themes and language related to wildfire trauma / displacement as well as frank political content…Includes photos and footage from the Palisades 2025 fire and evacuation.
Recommended for ages 14+
PRESS REVIEWS...
"YEAR IN AND YEAR OUT, THE HOLLYWOOD FRINGE FESTIVAL PRESENTS SHOWS, PLAYS AND PERFORMANCES THAT ARE TRANSFORMATIVE.
BURN SCAR TAKES IT TO ANOTHER LEVEL.
THE SHOW IS NOT ONLY ENTERTAINING BUT ALSO CATHARTIC."
NOHO ARTS DISTRICT
Link to review: https://nohoartsdistrict.com/burn-scar-review-hollywood-fringe-2026/
"Christine crafts a dynamic emotional ride... she blends personal tragedy, moments of comedy, and the required humorand fortitude it takes to battle bubbly insurance adjusters on a mission to delay, deny, and defend."
LAFPI
Link to review: https://lafpi.com/2026/06/fringefemmes-check-ins-burn-scar/
"In her captivating solo show...Dunford uses her skills as an actress
to robustly animate her narrative.
And as harrowing as it is,she ends it with a nod to the people she encountered who genuinely cared and helped..."
STAGE RAW
Link to review: https://stageraw.com/stage-raw-review-burn-scar/
ONE OF LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE'S
"12 SHOWS NOT TO MISS"
LINK: https://lamag.com/film/hollywood-fringe-festival-will-showcase-independent-theater-across-l-a/
AUDIENCE REVIEWS...
*Certified audience reviews posted to the Burn Scar show page at hollywoodfringe.org
"From the moment it started I knew I was in the hands of a performer with deep feeling,
wisdom and perspective; a wry sense of humor as well as a humane and loving outlook on the
world… a true artist working at her highest capacity.
This is a stunning, moving and at times very witty show about the fires that devastated our
city in January of 2025. It manages to be both very intimate and deeply personal while at the
same time profoundly universal. There are thoughts and moments and images that I am still
thinking about and will never forget."
KF June 11, 2026
"It’s the best I’ve seen at Fringe..."
JE June 5, 2026
"Wow, wow, wow!!! The writing and acting by Christine Dunford was so crisp, stellar, funny,
and tragic at the same time. I am so sorry that it was scheduled for only 3 performances. I
would have sent or taken everyone I could think of to see Burn Scar."
ES June 22, 2026
"A beautiful and compelling telling of a horrifying tragedy that reminds us of our humanity."
TKD June 28, 2026
"BURN SCAR is a searing first-hand account of the Palisades Fire and its aftermath
brilliantly performed by survivor actor Christine Dunford. This solo show takes us through
the slow-burning terror of the fires. But that’s just the beginning. It continues to chart the
trauma that survivors encounter after the fire has been put out and the adrenaline rushing
through their bloodstream has subsided. This is the trauma that undoes you.. the one
inflicted by insurance companies and airbnb owners, the one powered by capitalism and
institutional injustice.
BURN SCAR is also a story of survival… of finding the humor amidst the ashes and the compassion of humanity against the systemic cruelty.
There is hope in this play and Christine has earned the right to share it with us with her
gorgeous performance and massive heart."
ST June 27, 2026
"Loved it! Brilliantly written! I laughed I cried just an all around joy to watch!"
JC June 21, 2026
"Christine was so powerful. The show was emotional, funny, moving"
JH June 15, 2026
"It was so good, great writing great story, funny heartbreaking eye-opening"
CD June 13, 2026
"She tied this very personal story to the universal. You leave with a grounded hope for the
world. This is an amazing solo show!! It made me cry! It’s her personal story of the palisades fire, done in a vivid way, without any indulgence, which makes it incredibly powerful!"
TE June 13, 2026
"A standout performance of a deeply personal, but completely relatable human experience.
Both incredibly funny and achingly emotional, with a truly moving and uplifting message.
Beautifully written and brilliantly acted. Finding comedy in tragedy. See this show!!"
Anon June 7, 2026
"Razor sharp writing. Wonderful acting. Burn Scar is a gorgeous piece.
Beautifully written and masterfully performed — I was transported for a full hour. Attentive,
incensed at times, laughing at others, and eventually led somewhere very pure that I could
feel the whole audience needed."
BL June 5, 2026
INSPIRATION...
"If paradise now arises in hell (in a disaster)
it’s because, in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems,
we are free to live and act another way.”
Rebecca Solnit A Paradise Built in Hell
FIRE FLOWERS
And only where the foresst fires have sped,
Socrching relentlessly the cool north lands,
A sweet wild flower lifts up its purple head,
And, like some gentle spirit sorrow-fed,
It hides the scars with almost human hands.
And only to the heart that knows of grief,
Of desolating fire, of human pain,
There comes some fellow-feeling beautiful, if brief.
And life revives, and blossoms once again.
Emily Johnson - Tekahionwake
Of The Empire
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
- Mary Oliver
Octavia Butler Parable of the Sower
Just a week before the ’25 Palisades fire, I listened to Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (narrated by the incredible Lynne Thigpen) written in 1993.
If you know the book, you'll know that’s a pretty mind-bending coincidence.
Butler begins the story in 2024, in a Los Angeles plagued by drought and catastrophic wildfires, and an America where social safety nets have been shredded by the corporatization of every institution once intended to serve people and greed has poisoned and all but destroyed the natural world.
A couple of weeks later (after the Pali fire) I looked back and was astounded by the coincidences and parallels.
But even before the fire, I was shaken by another element in the book: a presidential candidate running with the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
When I encountered the book, I was still stunned – and stung – by the presidential election results in November, and here was Octavia Butler, way back in 1993, writing about a fictional presidential candidate who manipulated the American public and somehow wrested control of the most powerful leadership position in the world – using that slogan.
Butler actually based that character on Ronald Reagan, whose campaign for president in 1980 featured the slogan “Make America Great Again.”
Butler was incredibly open about her view of Reagan, saying he was “young, vigorous, and utterly unencumbered by conscience.” She said she had a
“special contempt” for him.
So she did what writers do: she created a character who showed what happens when a bullish personality, bottomless ambition, an excess of greed and no moral center manipulates the American public (I won’t give any more of the plot away, except to say that his success leads to the ruin of the country.)
Between that character, the slogan and the catastrophic fires, you might think Butler was prescient. But Butler wasn’t gifted with the ability to see the future in some mythic way – she saw it as a result of deep and endless research. She studied patterns in human behavior, ecological decline, the pendulum swing of power between increasingly polarized factions; she studied climate science, political science, sociology, the impact of corporate greed and deregulation - and from all of that research, extrapolated the “future.”
The fact that this novel grappled with two issues so central to my life in the past 2 years – a catastrophic political situation and a catastrophic fire – still stuns me.
When I heard that, after the fires in the Palisades and Alta Dena, Octavia's Bookshelf in Pasadena (named after her) turned the store into a mutual aid hub providing food, water, baby supplies, clothes & more for fire survivors, I just thought it was the most beautiful and impactful way to honor her.