Peaking through a dusty window, she saw not the warped floors, the dusty stage curtains, or the holes in the roof, but rather “I was looking at the other half of my life,” she wrote later.

While she waited, Becket wandered about until she was drawn down the building’s long colonnade to the door of the old auditorium. It was the summer of 1967 and there were only a few families left in the old railroad town.

For 45 years, until her retirement in 2012, she danced on her own stage, with costumes and props of her own creation, telling stories brought to life from her own imagination.īecket had been on her way to someplace down the road, touring her one-woman dance pantomime show, when her van got a flat tire and her then husband drove it into the Death Valley Junction filling station. On the outside, the whitewashed adobe auditorium all but blended in with the low hills and bone-colored landscape around it, but inside, over the next seven years, she created a richly colorful alternate reality inhabited by kings and queens, cats and acrobats, magic and make-believe. It stood at the end of a sprawling Spanish Colonial hacienda that once housed an entire company town complete with a post office and hospital. Nearly 50 years ago, Becket claimed a windswept and nearly forgotten corner of the desert for her own when she put a dollar down as security on an abandoned old theater in Death Valley Junction.

She leaves behind an endowment of art, culture and inspiration for both past and future generations of fans and visitors to her beloved Amargosa Opera House. Last Monday on the edge of Death Valley, in a quirky old adobe house filled with extraordinary paintings and stage memorabilia, 92-year-old dancer Marta Becket died as she lived, committed to a dream. This is a scan of a detail from a print of Marta Becket’s painting “The Spirit of Amargosa.”

Marta becket amargosa opera house inc