Though she still operates on a shoestring and worries about expenses, things are hardly so desperate now.
Becket explained, ''I said, 'I will paint an audience on the walls, an audience of the past.' '' Becket created the murals over four years in the early 1970's, when few people were coming to watch her dance, and she was only renting the building. The walls of the theater are alive with elaborate murals, a complex and skillfully rendered series of panels depicting the audience at a 16th-century Spanish opera house performance, a complete caste system from royalty to rabble. She makes her own costumes, designs the scenery, chooses the music (she's particularly fond of Johann Strauss), writes the narration and occasionally composes songs. She creates two new shows a year and puts on some 50 performances between October and May. Becket, who is 74, continues to create the dance and mime shows she has been putting on, alone or with a partner, for three decades. The 120-seat theater is now known, somewhat grandiosely, as the Amargosa Opera House, and though the stucco building is modest on the outside, inside it has become a remarkable shrine, built by a singularly determined woman to herself. It has been here for 31 years, since a former Broadway dancer and aspiring painter named Marta Becket was stranded nearby with a flat tire and somehow envisioned her future in an abandoned and dilapidated social hall. But amazingly there is a working theater. The nearest gas station is 16 miles beyond that. The nearest restaurant is seven miles north, at the casino on the Nevada border. The temperature climbs to near 120 degrees in the summer, and the wind actually whistles when it blows, which is nearly all the time.
Lonely seeming on the vast desert floor, with the mountains towering and dim in the distance, this is a place where a tree could fall and no one would hear it, if there were a tree. This town, a cluster of buildings at a crossroads, can be seen from miles away, where the highway bends and swoops down to a slightly lower elevation.
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