Dancing at the end of the Earth: Marta Becket's show at the Amargosa Opera House always goes on—with or without an audience

Dance Magazine, Feb, 2003 by Heather Wisner

Death Valley Junction is a destination, but it isn't a town, exactly--it's a hotel, a theater shadowed by some adobe houses, and a pair of abandoned buildings standing by the side of a two-lane road in Death Valley. The fastest way to get there is to fly into Las Vegas, rent a car, and drive nearly three hours west into the desert. You may want to stop in Pahrump, an hour away, for groceries and gas, because there are no service stations, no stores, and no restaurants in Death Valley Junction, nor is there bus or train service. Once you've passed Pahrump, the only sound you're likely to hear, besides static from the car radio, is the whoosh of warm desert wind past your ears. The landscape is scrubby and vast, ringed by red-rock hills that take on a spectacular hue at sunset; here, small pleasures--fleeting glimpses of roadrunners, stretches of freshly paved road--are unexpectedly gratifying.

There are two reasons people find themselves in Death Valley Junction: They stumble across it on the way to somewhere else, or they've come to see Marta Becket. This 78-year-old former Broadway dancer, still slim and graceful (and single-mindedly dedicated to her art), owns Death Valley Junction and operates the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel, aided by a five-person staff and her business and theatrical partner, Tom Willett. She maintains a small menagerie of cats, horses, and peacocks and oversees the long, single-story stucco hotel, throughout which she has painted small scenes and decorative flourishes.

She also creates and stars in every performance the theater offers. She has been dancing on this modest stage, out in the middle of nowhere, for thirty-five years. Becket makes her own costumes and sets, and has painted a sprawling mural of a Renaissance audience inside the theater--at times, it has been her only audience. Despite the stark beauty of the place and the obvious lure of running one's own show, questions still hang in the desert air: How does she do it? Why does she do it? How far will someone go for their art?

"All my New York dancer friends thought I was crazy," Becket says of the decision she made that changed her life dramatically. Around Easter 1967, she and her then-husband/ manager, Tom Williams, had been touring her solo act at colleges across the country when a tire on their trailer went flat outside of Death Valley Junction. At the time they pulled into town, there was a gas station where the tire could be fixed, but Becket was drawn beyond it to the town theater, long unused and badly in need of repair. After some discussion, she and her husband made a deal with the town manager to rent the theater for $45 a month. Then it was back to New York, to pack up their lives and move West.

Becket was leaving behind a long, sometimes lean, and arduous life as a New York dancer. She was born in Greenwich Village and, as a child, was often taken to professional dance and theater performances. She studied ballet, modern, and interpretive dancing, as well as art and music, until World War II broke out and her divorced mother encouraged her to quit school and earn money dancing in nightclubs. She made her debut on New Year's Eve, 1943, at the Hula Hut in the Bronx, where, as she recalls, she was introduced as "Little Marta Becket, Tippy-Toe Dancer." Her less-than-glorious entrance, performing a Slavonic dance she had choreographed herself, was preceded by a tap act and a midget who played the accordion. She was accompanied by a band that played oompah music, on a tiny stage, with the smell of fried potatoes wafting in from the kitchen.

For the next few years she did solo gigs, sometimes three times a night, for some combination of pay, food, and lodging. Once the demand for such entertainment waned, Becket took a job with the Radio City Music Hall corps de ballet. She didn't much like the uniformity of the corps, she says, but she adjusted, and danced four shows daily--these ranged thematically from a Sylphides-style piece to an undersea ballet. She also won parts in a 1946 revival of Showboat, a musical version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and Wonderful Town.

Periodically, Becket also took work as a model and a freelance artist to support herself and her mother. Her assignments included illustrating George Balanchine's book Complete Stories of the Great Ballets.

She yearned for more autonomy. "As a dancer, you're told what to do," she said. "Dancers aren't encouraged to think for themselves." She developed more solo work; when a would-be impresario's offer to fund a show for Becket and a group of dancers fell through, Becket auditioned for jobs alone, dancing all the parts she'd choreographed for the show by herself. Eventually, she began to tour her solos at schools and universities, dancing up to three shows daily and driving long distances in between engagements. Williams helped book her act, which she toured for a few years. She'd also begun to sell some of her paintings, and had found a gallery to host a one-woman show of her work; but the opening, planned for November 23, 1963, was thwarted by Kennedy's assassination. A second planned opening, two years later at another gallery, coincided with a citywide power outage in New York.