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Arriving in Death Valley Junction, California in 1967 with a flat tire, New York City born and bred Marta Becket stumbled upon an abandoned theater. Within weeks she had established residency in the adjacent run down hotel with peeling exterior and separating laminate doors painted Caribbean blue. The dusty village just over 230 miles north east of San Diego that serves as the eastern gateway into Death Valley would never be the same.
Forty some odd years later, the exterior of the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel located at the crossroads of highways 127, 190 and 12 looks the same but the interior has been transformed. Becket’s colorful murals adorn the walls and ceiling not only in the theater proper but in the restaurant, and throughout the adjacent hotel originally owned by the Borax Company. Paint it and they will come had been her motto.
And it worked; they came. They still come. Decades after she escaped the City and arrived in the minuscule desert town she is still performing her own plays, singing her own compositions on the stage she had reclaimed as midlife starlet with classical training in piano, voice and dance.
Waiting in a line that wrapped around the courtyard was a wide variety of people. Young, old, fancy, common, wealthy, not wealthy, and foreigners, as well as the locals who had seen her shows hundreds of times. The ramshackle theater clings on to dear life in the desert yet there we all were—to see Becket who had become an icon. Overgrown mesquite trees pour over adobe walls from unused courtyards and tumbleweeds roll against locked cast iron gates. The paint cracked and peeling appears as if a good bluster would sand blast all the clinging chips clear off the adobe. We stood and waited in the warming afternoon sunshine.
When the doors finally opened, the quiet, respectful and somewhat intrigued crowd filed in to find seats, marveling at the murals as it did so. Although the murals Becket has painted over the last thirty years are world class folk art, there is evidence that some of the décor has been completed on a shoestring budget. The crafty theater lights, for instance, were made from painted coffee cans with beaded fringe glued around the edges.
Becket’s 15$ a head performance was priceless. I sat in her painted theater with more than a hundred people who had come to Death Valley Junction to see her re-enact tidbits of past shows. At 87, she has retired her toe slippers and performs the one woman hour long matinee from her wheelchair. Encumbered with serious arthritis, Becket fumbled with props and lines but most were delivered without flaw after years of retaining things to memory. None of her plays are written down, but many have been recorded on VHS or DVD sold in the gift shop off the lobby and on the hotel’s website.
I wouldn’t have missed the chance to see such a legendary American icon perform for the world. One of the primary reasons I had come to Death Valley was to see her and I am ever glad I bothered.
Arriving in Death Valley Junction, California in 1967 with a flat tire, New York City born and bred Marta Becket stumbled upon an abandoned theater. Within weeks she had established residency in the adjacent run down hotel with peeling exterior and separating laminate doors painted Caribbean blue. The dusty village just over 230 miles north east of San Diego that serves as the eastern gateway into Death Valley would never be the same.
Forty some odd years later, the exterior of the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel located at the crossroads of highways 127, 190 and 12 looks the same but the interior has been transformed. Becket’s colorful murals adorn the walls and ceiling not only in the theater proper but in the restaurant, and throughout the adjacent hotel originally owned by the Borax Company. Paint it and they will come had been her motto.
And it worked; they came. They still come. Decades after she escaped the City and arrived in the minuscule desert town she is still performing her own plays, singing her own compositions on the stage she had reclaimed as midlife starlet with classical training in piano, voice and dance.
Waiting in a line that wrapped around the courtyard was a wide variety of people. Young, old, fancy, common, wealthy, not wealthy, and foreigners, as well as the locals who had seen her shows hundreds of times. The ramshackle theater clings on to dear life in the desert yet there we all were—to see Becket who had become an icon. Overgrown mesquite trees pour over adobe walls from unused courtyards and tumbleweeds roll against locked cast iron gates. The paint cracked and peeling appears as if a good bluster would sand blast all the clinging chips clear off the adobe. We stood and waited in the warming afternoon sunshine.
When the doors finally opened, the quiet, respectful and somewhat intrigued crowd filed in to find seats, marveling at the murals as it did so. Although the murals Becket has painted over the last thirty years are world class folk art, there is evidence that some of the décor has been completed on a shoestring budget. The crafty theater lights, for instance, were made from painted coffee cans with beaded fringe glued around the edges.
Becket’s 15$ a head performance was priceless. I sat in her painted theater with more than a hundred people who had come to Death Valley Junction to see her re-enact tidbits of past shows. At 87, she has retired her toe slippers and performs the one woman hour long matinee from her wheelchair. Encumbered with serious arthritis, Becket fumbled with props and lines but most were delivered without flaw after years of retaining things to memory. None of her plays are written down, but many have been recorded on VHS or DVD sold in the gift shop off the lobby and on the hotel’s website.
I wouldn’t have missed the chance to see such a legendary American icon perform for the world. One of the primary reasons I had come to Death Valley was to see her and I am ever glad I bothered.