Samuel Beckett would have been as delighted as a toddler with a bubble blower at the dark absurdity of my situation. On Nov. 6, 2024, hundreds of people braved Los Angeles traffic and sat for the first preview performance of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Geffen Playhouse. An eerie, discordant sound cue droned as I waited for the lights to bloom and thereby begin the 2½-hour odyssey of despair and postmodern hijinks. But as the lights came up, I had only one thought: “I wonder what the hell is left of my goddamn house?”
Earlier that very day, the day after the 2024 election, that afternoon, my house caught on fire. As I was rehearsing in L.A., my wife Holiday was evacuating our pigs, dogs, and peahen into her truck as embers flew through the air, embedding themselves into nearby hedges and shingles and gutters. You see, there was a small fire about 10 miles away. But as we all now know, when you add the Santa Ana winds to a distant fire at 60 m.p.h., all hell breaks loose. Luckily, our handyman Scott was installing some doorknobs that morning. He quickly inflated the tires on our pig trailer, while Holiday used a giant bass net to capture Alma the peahen. Holiday later told me embers were whistling down like fiery shrapnel as the sky filled with smoke. As of curtain time, because we had not been allowed back onto the property, I had zero idea how much of our house was left. Two of our neighbors’ homes caught fire like Roman candles and evaporated. But thanks to the moxie of our fire department (and our cinder-block walls) we lost only a few rooms. Plus a couple dozen trees, a shed, parts of our roof, our fences, and most of our sprinkler system.
What’s also strange—and poignant—is that for the past several years I had been working on climate communications with the organization Climate Basecamp, which I co-founded in 2022 to raise awareness about the crisis. And here I was, a victim of that self-same issue. You see, the weather in Southern California, like everywhere else, is changing dramatically. When I first moved to L.A. 25 years ago, I was struck by how much precipitation there was every winter. Weeks of pounding rain would fill the canyons and concrete rivers. But then that stopped. It was followed by an off-and-on stretch of one of the worst droughts in California history—in fact, the past 25 years were the driest the region has experienced in more than 1,200 years. This set the stage for what was to come.
Some factors for this particular November fire? The previous winter had been a wet one and the underbrush grew like, well, wildfire. But there hadn’t been a drop of rain in months, and the Santa Ana winds were at twice their normal speed. Kindling was everywhere, just waiting for a spark. Last year was the warmest year in recorded history. And January 2025—when yet another devastating fire broke out in L.A.—was the warmest January ever recorded; 100-year out-of-the-box climate events are now happening every decade. All this adds up to some deadly extreme weather. And I’m far from the only one who has felt the wrath of climate change.
Could the population and L.A. government have done more to prepare for and mitigate the fires? Of course. But there are larger forces at work. There’s so much we can do, we have to do. Besides reducing our carbon footprint, moving to EVs and cheaper renewable energy sources, and limiting the amount of meat we eat, we can get deeply acquainted with the science of the reality of our climate. This is not a partisan issue, it’s simply the truth about how oil and coal and deforestation have affected our planet. L.A. is the cultural capital of the world, and speaking science truth in the stories we artists produce would go a long way toward addressing the crisis.
But back to our story. After the curtain closed and I could at last survey the damage, I found the charred land around my house, in a bit of cosmic irony, directly evoked the barren, post-apocalyptic landscape of the tragicomedy. That vision, I doubt Mr. Beckett would be delighted with.