After furnishing the theater with stage and seating, she simply painted an audience on the walls. Becket then embarked on what would become a lifetime project: to transform the old theater into an opera house and to build an audience for her one-woman shows.Īttracting an audience in a ghost town surrounded by hundreds of miles of empty desert is no easy task, but Becket was undaunted. The whole story of what grew from that initial assessment can be found in Becket’s recently published autobiography “ To Dance on Sands,” but the pivotal event was that she and her husband bought the property.

“I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world,” Becket says in her show. Though already in a state of serious disrepair, the buildings ignited Becket’s imagination, especially the surprising structure at the end of the row – an abandoned theater. While she waited for the tire to be repaired, Becket took a look around a block of decaying adobe buildings built in the 1920s by the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Now in her 80s, Becket and her then-husband arrived at the intersection of California Highways 190 and 127 in 1967, dragging a trailer with a flat tire. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go see her show!” … “I saw her back in the ’80s.” … “Is she still performing?” … “Um-who’s Marta Becket?”įor those who’d be asking that last question, Marta Becket is the Ballerina of Death Valley Junction, a dreamer who traded a career in New York City for a crumbling ghost town in the middle of nowhere. ‘Performance…Tonight’ at Marta Becket’s Amargosaįloat Marta Becket’s name out at a cocktail party in Las Vegas, and you’ll get a variety of responses.

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