Marta Becket and the Audience She Painted for Herself

Death Valley Junction is not where you go when you are looking for an audience. It is a crossroads in the Mojave Desert, population in the dozens, a cluster of adobe buildings that once served as housing for Pacific Coast Borax Company workers. In nineteen sixty-seven, the population was somewhere near zero. The company complex had been largely abandoned for years.

Marta Becket was in her early forties, a trained dancer and artist from New York City, on a camping trip through the desert with her then-husband when their car got a flat tire outside Death Valley Junction. While waiting for the repair, she walked through the empty compound and stopped at the door of a small theatre. She looked through a crack in the door at the dark interior, the stage, the bare walls, the broken seats.

She rented it for forty-five dollars a month.

The problem with the Amargosa Opera House, as she renamed the building, was that almost no one ever came. Death Valley Junction was not on anyone's itinerary. Some nights Becket performed for three people. Some nights for one. Some nights for the darkness itself.

Her solution was to paint an audience. Over several years, working in the offseasons, she covered all three interior walls of the theatre with a Renaissance-style mural. Tier by tier, row by row, she painted the audience she wanted: Spanish courtiers in the balconies, Mexican peasants in the upper gallery, Moorish figures in the boxes, monks and bishops and jesters filling every seat. When she performed, she performed for all of them. Whether any living person came through the door was, in a certain sense, beside the point.

Real audiences did come eventually. Word spread along the desert circuit and then further. People drove from Las Vegas and Los Angeles and eventually from Europe and Japan to see the woman who danced alone in the Mojave for painted kings and painted peasants. By the time she was performing in her seventies and eighties, the Amargosa Opera House had a following that most urban theatres would envy.

Marta Becket gave her last performance in two thousand twelve. She died on January thirtieth, two thousand seventeen, at the age of ninety-two. The California Historical Landmark designation, number one thousand thirty-one, was awarded in two thousand three, while she was still performing inside it.

What she left behind is not quite preservable. The murals are there. The stage is there. But what made the Amargosa Opera House what it was, the specific act of performing for a painted audience in the middle of nowhere because the art required it, was Becket's alone.