Writer: Erin Hunter
Director: Kristin Duffy
The Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles has, since its founding in 1921, attracted celebrities attracted by its privacy, natural beauty and lack of tourists. But many non-famous families lived there, including Erin Hunter’s parents.
In January 2025, an extended period of drought, combined with the Santa Ana winds gusting up to 80 miles per hour, led to a wildfire engulfing the Palisades. Taking 24 days to contain, the fire burned 23,448 acres of land and destroyed nearly 7,000 properties.
Hunter’s irreverent take is signalled when she comes on stage, a ukulele crooked under one arm as if it is the end of a firehose. While most of her storytelling comprises Hunter’s own experiences of dealing with her parents – a panicked mother who is forever watching the news as it reports on the fire raging outside her own home, the unflappable father who continues working at his desk – the show is topped and tailed with a character of a firefighter based in the nearby Topanga Valley, also hit by wildfire. It is a reminder that the emergency responders who battled for a month to contain the wildfire were local residents, too.
Less successful is the creation of a beauty blogger who refuses to follow the evacuation order until she has finished her Instagram Live “Get Ready With Me” beauty regime. While the skits have plenty of laughs, it feels like this type of social media influencer has been lampooned so often that there needs to be some real payoff tying her story into that of Hunter’s parents.
Hunter also delivers a marvellous caricature of (then President-Elect) Donald Trump, recounting some of his less-than-helpful interjections in which he downplayed the effects of climate change in making wildfires more likely, and claimed that California’s politicians were not releasing water from the north of the state to LA for the preservation of a fish. There is ample mileage from her impression; it does not really need a faked storming off in objection at having to play the character, as the director pleads and “apologises” to the performer from the audience.
Besides such theatrics, Burn Baby Burn: LA Inferno creates a real sense of the trepidation and terror faced by people as they flee and as their homes and lives are destroyed by fire. Despite the shocking events, Hunter is able to keep the matter light. The ukulele is brandished at several moments, from hailing the actor (and local resident) Steve Guttenberg as the Hero of the Palisades, to acknowledging that the struggle to contain the fire was severely hampered by the local reservoir having been recently drained in order to make much-needed repairs.
Another skit, in which Hunter plays an operator at an insurance call centre, helps drive home how the insurance companies made their customers’ lives worse by refusing to allow copies of their policies – the originals of which were likely destroyed as their homes burned – to be emailed, instead insisting on posting physical copies.
It’s moments like that, using humour to highlight the tragic and mundane aspects of the wildfire, in which Burn Baby Burn succeeds the best. Those moments that don’t work stem from a lack of confidence in Hunter’s own retelling of her parents’ plight.
In the play’s final moments, we see photos of her parents surveying their destroyed townhouse, dressed in full-body hazmat suits to protect themselves from the toxic fumes of the smouldering buildings, her mother embellishing hers with a jaunty sun hat. It’s that image that sums up Hunter’s play: a retelling of an environmental and social catastrophe, with a dash of Californian whimsy.
Runs until 10 August 2025
Camden Fringe runs until 24 August 2025
