A Vision Lives in Death Valley

When the theater lights dim and the audience is gone, Marta Becket slips off her ballet shoes and reviews her work.

She eases her 77-year-old body into a creaky, old donated theater seat, alone with her thoughts inside the cold, aging building.

It was a good show, a good audience for such a chilly night in this desert ghost town.

Watching her is the audience she painted on the walls long ago--kings, queens, nuns, monks, ladies of the night. They were here before most tourists came to see her one-woman show, and they are her solace.

“After the show, when I’m alone and putting things away and just the stage is lit. I love that moment. It’s sort of a magic moment,” Becket says.

Becket always knew that she wanted to be a dancer, but didn’t take her first lesson until she was 14. She attended ballet school on scholarship because her family couldn’t afford lessons.

Her father was a newspaper reporter in New York and often received passes to operas, concerts and ballets. It was at the theater that Becket fell in love with performing. She also began drawing and painting pictures of the shows she attended.

“I love dance. I love ballet. It’s the world I want,” she says.

She performed for her high school and later in nightclubs and restaurants in New York. She danced at Radio City Music Hall and in Broadway shows, but never cared much for dancing with other girls. Becket preferred to be the star.

“When I was 29, I decided it was time to start out on my own.”

She created her own show, arranging music, sewing costumes. She went on the road, performing in tours for several colleges. Later, she married and made money by selling her paintings in Greenwich Village. All the while, she continued dancing.

Then, on a trip out West with her husband, a flat tire changed her life.

During a camping trip in 1967 in Death Valley, the trailer tire went flat. Becket and her husband, Tom Williams, heard about a nearby ghost town with a gas station and traveled to Death Valley Junction, an abandoned borax mining camp on the Nevada-California border.

She walked the dusty streets as the sun began to disappear. There was the Amargosa Hotel, the adobe houses she thought resembled a Mexican village and, at one end, an abandoned social hall.

“I looked around this town. I was transfixed by it. It looked like time had stopped,” she says.

Becket peered through a hole in the social hall’s door and saw a tiny stage.

“I saw the other half of my life when I looked through that door,” she says.

She had wanted to leave New York anyway, so she and Tom agreed to rent the hall for $45 a month. They moved to Death Valley Junction and Becket began her new life.

“My ship came in late. In fact, I came out here and found my ship in the desert.”

Even with a leaky ceiling, warped wood floor, muddy walls and a stage that needed remodeling, Becket saw only the building’s beauty. It was the perfect place for her one-woman show.

And, in 1968, she made her debut at the renamed Amargosa Opera House. In the beginning, only the three Mormon families who lived in the town came to watch. Becket asked for a $1.50 donation.

She wrote songs, dialogue, sewed costumes, painted sets. And she danced. She danced as if thousands of fans were watching her.

Even when every seat was empty, she still danced.

When a flood washed muddy water into the opera house, Becket looked up at the plain, white walls and decided to create her own admirers. “I said, ‘I’m going to put an audience on these walls.’ I will create a world of the past.”

For six years, she drew and painted her imaginary fans. Royalty, nobility, bullfighters, a lady dancing, a fat man who had fallen asleep. All were watching her, cheering for her. She painted them as they would look while watching an opera in the 16th century.

On the ceiling, she painted a blue sky with dancing cherubs, clouds and doves.

“There isn’t any other place in the world that tantalizes me,” Becket says.

It’s four hours until show time and Becket is trying to rest her legs. She tugs at the purple sweater draping her frail frame and tightens it around her waist.

She sits inside the drafty Amargosa Hotel, purses her lips and tells her story.

“It’s mystifying. I feel as if this is what I was intended to do,” she says.

Evening comes and tourists have lined up outside the opera house. The nearest town is 23 miles away, but somehow they find their way here. The theater seats only 114 and often extra chairs must be brought in.

Becket’s longtime friend, 73-year-old Tom Willett, shows up in a gold-sequined hat and a red, ruffled tuxedo shirt to take tickets.

Willett is also the stagehand, emcee, stage manager and Becket’s silent sidekick in the show. He used to do maintenance around the hotel and, in 1983, Becket asked him to join the show. Her husband had left the same year. Now Becket and Willett are the town’s only residents.

“Marta does something on the stage few people have seen,” Willett says. “I guess they come to see it because it’s a memory of the way things used to be.”

The audience members--50 people this night--take their seats and the curtain opens. This show is “The Dollmaker,” about a baron who falls in love with a doll. Becket has created and starred in 14 shows over the years. Her performance season runs from October through May.

Her back slightly stooped and her arms extended, Becket glides up on her toe shoes, turning and stepping as she tells the story with her dance. Delicate and graceful, she dances across the stage to taped music, her real audience and the one on the walls watching her, an old Army stove keeping them warm.

“Her strength and freedom to be what she wants to be--she’s just beautiful,” says Claudia Hood, who came to the show from Claremont.

Afterward, the crowd waits to get Becket’s autograph. They slowly file out, stealing one more glance at the artwork.

Becket puts her costumes away and is alone again in the world she created.