Marta Becket And The Amaragosa Opera House

Born in NY in 1925, Marta would live a life not yet familiar with anyone else of her time. As a child, she supported her family with modeling, dancing and artwork comissions. She worked on Broadway and the Radio City Music Hall. In 1967 Marta was on a long camping trip with her husband, and ended breaking down in the hot and windy village of Death Valley Junction, CA. While stranded and awaiting the repair, she poked around the town and fell in love with the local but abandoned theatre. She had found a home for her one-woman show, and began making plans to acquire it.












She would often dance to an empty theatre in the early days..and even today. She began to paint murals on the walls of an "audience" to keep her company, heated still by a pot-bellied stove to this day. Her husband long dead, Marta remains as the sole population number for Death Valley Junction. She opens her theatre every day, visitors or not, and performs as much of her show as she can. She mostly talks to the visitors now, kind of a living history lesson in her eighties. The show is not the draw at the Amaragosa. It never has been. It's Marta, and her magic lifetime of performance art. She will make you cry a little and you aren't sure why, but not in a bad way. She represents something in all of us that we rarely pursue. To chase your life's dream to a place like this is something few are willing to do.











Marta is all alone now in her Death Valley Junction home...population 1. Go to the Amaragosa Theatre as fast as you can, as soon as you can and sit with her before it's too late........


for you.