BURN SCAR Will Come to the 2026 Hollywood Fringe Festival
Christine Dunford's solo show will perform at Theatre of NOTE on Cahuenga Boulevard in Hollywood.
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Burn Scar: A Comedy of Catastrophic Proportions, a new solo show written and performed by Christine Dunford, will play three performances only in the 2026 Hollywood Fringe Festival at Theatre of NOTE in Hollywood on Thursday, June 4, at 7:15pm; Saturday, June 13, at 4pm; and Saturday, June 20 at 7:30pm.
On the morning of January 7, 2025, a veteran actress grabbed her dogs, her medications, and her nerve, and drove three hours through gridlocked LA traffic to escape the largest wildfire in the city's history. What followed — a dizzying rotation of AirBnBs, soul-crushing insurance battles, and one transformative encounter — became this solo show. “Burn scar” is the geological term for earth scorched by wildfire — hardened, brittle, impenetrable. It is also a precise metaphor for what happens to people navigating the aftermath of catastrophe in an era of systemic cruelty. Burn Scar gives voice to an experience that is at once deeply personal and urgently communal. Running time: 60 minutes.
The show weaves together the visceral chaos of the great escape, the Kafkaesque nightmare of insurance claims, sharp political observation, and the unexpected grace of a single human encounter that cracked the hardening wide open. It features real photos and footage from the evacuation — and, crucially, it is very, very funny. Humor, Dunford argues, is not a retreat from trauma but the only sane response to it. Set against the backdrop of a political moment in which, as she puts it, “cruelty won at the ballot box,” Burn Scar uses the Palisades fire and its aftermath as a lens for examining the broader hardening of the American landscape — and as evidence that finding the antidote to that hardening is still possible.
Christine Dunford was born in the Bronx and trained at Juilliard. She has spent her entire adult life bringing stories to life — from Shakespeare at The Public Theater in NYC and Caryl Churchill on Broadway to Mamet at The Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. She has appeared in more than 100 episodes of television, including Marshals, Acapulco, Cowboy Bebop, 9-1-1, The Purge, Arrested Development, Two and a Half Men and Seinfeld. Her film work includes Ulee's Gold and Love & Basketball, and she has lent her voice to major video game titles including Horizon Zero Dawn, Infamous, and The Outer Worlds. She has directed plays and performed solo shows at multiple theatres and at the HBO Aspen Comedy Festival. Burn Scar marks her return to the solo stage.
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