The Amargosa Opera House

I have a story for you. It's about a road trip that changed a woman's life. She was an

artist from New York City, the painter and dancer named Marta Beckett. I'll let one of

her good friends take it from here. My name is Fred Conboy, C-O-N is in

neighbor B as in basketball, O-Y, and I met Marta around 2001.

Marta had been on the road with her husband, Bob Williams. She had been performing in New York

for the first 44 years of her life. She was in three Broadway musicals, she was in several

one woman shows, and so she set out with her husband on the road. In a van pulling a camper,

in the camper she had her easel for to paint because she was a prolific visual artist,

as well as a ballerina that performed and she also made her own costume. So for about nine years,

she was crisscrossing the country primarily in the Midwest.

And then when she got out to California in 1967, on Easter, they had a flat tire

while they were camping in Death Valley and they dragged their rig up to this garage,

a standard station, which was the only thing operating in the town at the time.

So while the flat tire was being fixed over here in the garage,

Marta had time to wander around the abandoned town of Death Valley Junction,

and she went over to the social hall, corkall social hall, and she peaked through this

chink in the door on the west side. And there she saw a shaft of light that fell on a doll's head

and she saw a kangaroo wrap. And there was a stage. And immediately she had this epiphonal

moment that said, this is the place that I was meant to come. As the fortune teller in New York

had prophesied many years ago, you will move to a very rural location and you will spend the happiest

years of your life. She didn't seem like walls. She saw the possibilities that she said,

empty spaces are places to create. And so she did.

I'm Kelly McEvers, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world's strange,

incredible, and wondrous places. And today we are going to a place called Death Valley Junction,

to hear the story of how Marta Beckett created the Amargosa Opera House in the desert,

a place where she could live out her dream as an artist. More after this.

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In August 1967, Marta Beckett packed her bags, left New York City with her husband Tom Williams,

and moved to a remote spot in the desert of California just outside Death Valley.

When she first settled in the town of Death Valley Junction, there were only a couple of businesses

there, including the Amorgosa Hotel, which she would later run. But as Fred Conboy said,

what really caught her interest was the Corkill Hall, this abandoned social hall that was built

back in the town's mining days. Marta eventually transformed it into the Amorgosa Upper House.

This theater full of murals painted by Marta herself. Here's Fred again on how it all started.

After she got the inspiration like this is it, this is this is my destiny. She sought out the

town manager and struck a handshake deal to rent that space, just that space in the social

hall for $45 a month. And the little apartment next door to it where she and Tom lived.

Marta's friends back in New York did not think it was a good idea to move to the desert.

But when Fred met Marta for the first time, he got it. Because I had grown up in a family where

my father was a professor of theater and cell and my mother was an artist and a writer, I understood

why theater was important, why it was so magical and why she'd been doing art for so long in the desert.

Marta was the only child of Henry Beckett, a newspaper reporter and Helen Brown,

who once owned a furniture store. Her parents separated when she was young. At 14, she started studying

ballet. And even before that, she had already been composing. And she used a Russian surname.

She wrote music under the name of Olga Marna, because she emulated the great dancers in the ballet

ruse. And so when she wrote her own original music, she said, you know, buy Olga Marna,

parentheses, Marta Beckett. So for 44 years, she was cultivating her dance on Broadway,

at Radio City, and then into these arts venues across the country.

But it all came to a stop at Death Valley Junction. When she had the revelation that this was the

place she was meant to be. She even believed the building she discovered was calling her, saying,

take me, do something with me, I offer you life. So she went for it. It was a lot of work.

What it was like was it was kind of ramshackle. I mean, it was kind of run down. There was leaks

in the roof. The walls were dirty and heads, you know, water stains down them. They didn't really

have any lighting that was the theater lighting. So her husband Tom got to work and they cleaned it

up. She of course envisioned those blank walls as the canvases that she would then paint her

imaginary audience of all these different historically inspired figures, but all of them out of her own

imagining. Marta and Tom were resourceful. They used metal coffee cans to make stage lights.

They extended the stage to make it bigger. And it took her about six years to cover the walls

and the ceiling of the theater with art. This incredible imaginary audience you see when you're

standing on stage. She had snore panels with Native Americans. You have the Italian

revelers. You have the governess and her court or whatever you want to call it.

You have the ecclesiastes with the monks and the domes and then the madame and her brothel.

There was two Jewish rabbis that helped support Marta through her art training.

Those Jewish rabbis are immortalized in the opera house. If you look to the Spanish court

on the south wall, you will see to the right two Jewish rabbis with their beard. And they are next

to the nuns and the prostitutes adjacent. So some interesting juxtapositions. That's Marta's

sense of humor and Wednesday. Marta's first show at the opera house was on February 10th, 1968.

Fred knows this because she wrote all these details in the little red notebook that Fred now keeps.

It says, Curtin, Romance, Kupiedel, Garden Party, De Ga, Gossip and Slavonic Dance. So that's

the repertoire that she did on that night to an audience of 12 people. And she also has how

much money she raked in that night in 1968 on February 10th, a grand total of $11.55.

So about half of her repertoire when she arrived at Death Valley Junction were things that she

was reprising from her earlier years starting in New York. Some of them she'd been doing for 15

years before she ever got there. She was like show bow wonderful town and a tree grows in Brooklyn.

Then she did these melodramas and comedies that she invented while she was at Death Valley Junction.

So typically a show would consist of things that she was very familiar with.

Like the mirror, carpet and lemon, a Middle Eastern folk tale.

She first did this show back in New York. It had several past characters, but at the theater she

was working for. They fell on hard times and Marta says no problem. All play all the parts

of all the people. So she ended up playing seven or eight characters in this play. So she

brought that particular play out. And by doing that she could hone and refine something that she

felt comfortable with because she'd been doing it for so long. So she just continued to refine

the tried tested and true familiar classical ballets.

Marta was living her dream, but this is Death Valley, a desert where temperatures can get up to 130

degrees. And it wasn't just the heat. There were flash floods too.

She got her first day lunge really in the spring of 1968 when she was trying to clean up the

upper house. And then she got flooded out and had mud and water. And she writes about this

in her autobiography like, wow, I didn't know I was going to come to the desert and experience

a flood. But that occurrence has been repeating for decades. And because the ground is so

hard and compacted out there, it doesn't soak into the ground. And furthermore,

that little town is in a floodplain. It's very level. And so in the water does not

easily divert and just run off and down the road, it rises up in the driveway above the

curbing and flows into the hotel rooms and into the upper house from all directions.

It's just one of the bakeries that Marta had to deal with over time. And I would say every

two or three years she she dealt with a bad flood. I remember one time it flooded so bad it

actually flooded her old. And she had to actually throw away a lot of her fangs including some

books that got waterlogged. But Marta was resilient. That's one of the characteristics of her

character is that the show must go on. And it always did.

Marta and her husband Tom split in the mid-80s, but she stayed in the desert and continued

performing at the Amargosa Opera House for more than four decades. People from all over the

world drove to Death Valley Junction to see her even when she could no longer stand up.

She stopped and her mid-80s because she had a need it was getting out. It was hard for her to

get up on her tippy toes and do to get up on point. So she started doing what we called the

sitting down show. And the sitting down show still drew quite an audience because it's Marta

Beckett. So even though she wasn't dancing and acting, she still was healthy and she still had a

strong voice. And she had her passion about her shows and things. So she would float court on

stage literally in a kind of a throne like a king. And she would sing and recite stories and

poems to the delight of the audience. Marta Beckett died on January 30, 2017. She was 92 years old.

Today Fred is the president of the Amargosa Opera House, making sure to preserve Marta's legacy.

She had a little path from her home to story home back on the back side of the property.

And so she would love to come over and to the Opera House and go on stage and sometimes saying

she eventually had to use a wheelchair. But she still made the little trek over from her home to

the back door of the Opera House. One of the last very beautifully plainant moments of her life

in that wheelchair was when she was being wheeled back to her home from the Opera House by Hilda

Vazquez, one of our dancers that have learned some of her choreography in the last part of her life.

And Marta began dancing in her wheelchair. She literally was kicking her legs up like a windmill.

And it was so emblematic of her spirit because even though she can't dance anymore,

she can't hardly stand up anymore. She was dancing on sands. Which, as you know, it's the

tie-liver book. I thought if I ever made a movie about Marta, that would be how I would end it

of her legs, you know, with making circles against the sunset in Dev Valley.

And it was her aspiration to be a dust devil when she died. She did not want to be buried in the ground.

She said I want to be a dust devil and spin perpetually in the air. And so she was when she died,

we took her ashes and scattered them over the town with wildflower seed. So she did in fact get to

fulfill her wish to become a dust devil.

That was Fred Conboy. The Amargosa Opera House is still active today. It hosts cultural events.

And you can still stay in the hotel. I always make a point of stopping there on my way to

Dev Valley. For more information, you can visit their website, Amargosa Opera House.org.

And if you want to read more about Marta Beckett, you can check out her memoir to dance on sands

and a documentary about her life called Amargosa. We will leave these links in the show notes.

This episode was produced by Manolo Morales. Our podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura

and Sirius XM podcasts. The production team for this episode includes Dylan Thurus,

Doug Baldinger, Camille Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Jerome Campbell, Amanda McGowan,

Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luce Fleming. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall. If you like the show,

give us a good review and a good rating wherever you get your podcasts and make sure to follow us

so you never miss the episode. I'm Kelly McEvers. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

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