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Marta Becket, Dancer Who Built a Theater in the Desert, Dies at 92

The audience in the Amargosa Opera House on Oct. 1, 2005, to see the season’s first performance of Marta Becket’s show “Masquerade.”Credit...Sam Morris/Las Vegas Sun, via Associated Press

Marta Becket was a New York ballerina and Broadway dancer on tour with her one-woman show in 1967 when she peered into an abandoned social hall in Death Valley Junction, Calif., and visualized her future: a theater of her own.

The floor was warped. Mud streaked the walls. Kangaroo rats were running wild. Yet it was there, amid the alkali flats, whistling winds and triple-digit heat of the Mojave Desert, that Ms. Becket and her husband resettled and built the Amargosa Opera House, where she performed her ballets and pantomimes for the next 40 years.

Ms. Becket turned the Amargosa into a cultural institution in a desolate area, an attraction to tourists, ranchers, farmers and even prostitutes from a local bordello.

“I found my ship out here in the desert when I was 43,” she said in “Amargosa,” a 2000 documentary about her directed by Todd Robinson. “I’m still dancing, and I’m going to keep moving until I drop.”

When Ms. Becket died on Monday at 92, her only survivor was the theater,the walls and ceiling she painted depicting a colorful audience that would never leave: Renaissance royalty, nuns and monks, clowns and jousters, revelers and cherubs — and Clive Barnes, the longtime drama critic of The New York Times, a playful nod to her theatrical past.

Rhonda Shade, the general manager of the opera house, confirmed the death.Ms. Becket had recently had several bouts of pneumonia, she said.

Ms. Becket and her husband, Thomas Williams, were camping in Death Valley in 1967 when a flat tire on their trailer forced them to find a garage nearly 40 miles away, in Death Valley Junction. While Mr. Williams was repairing the tire, Ms. Becket wandered over to a collection of buildings, including a hotel, that had been erected in the 1920s by Pacific Coast Borax, a mining company.

She was, she later recalled, drawn hypnotically to the largest structure, Corkhill Hall, where miners had gathered years before.

“By now I had forgotten the tire,” she wrote in her autobiography, “To Dance on Sands: The Life and Art of Death Valley’s Marta Becket,” published in 2006. “I walked over to the building, afraid to take my eyes off it, lest it should disappear.”

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Marta Becket performing at the opera house in 2004.Credit...Monica Almeida/The New York Times

She and her husband found that they could rent the building for $45 a month, and set about renovating it. The roof was fixed. Folger’s coffee cans were turned into stage lights. Ms. Becket sewed the curtains and costumes and painted the sets.

Her first performance came early the next year. Attendance for her shows was sparse at first: Sometimes she would look out from the stage at an audience of no one.

After a flash desert flood in 1968 left a foot of mud inside the theater, she had an epiphany during the cleanup: She would paint an audience on its walls, one that was always packed and keep her company when no one else showed up.

“People would tell me that I was wasting my time painting on the walls of a building that I would never own or that I couldn’t sell and it could be torn down any time,” she said in the documentary about the years she needed to complete the work. “I would say to them that no one can take away the hours of joy that I had painting it.”

Her distant outpost was, in time, visited by National Geographic, Life and People magazines. News crews came by to learn why this lithe and determined dancer had left Manhattan for artistic salvation in the desert, where she played to audiences in tulle.

“Am I eccentric?” she asked in an interview with The New York Times in 1999. “Is it eccentric to love your work so much that you would go anywhere in the world to do it?”

The nonprofit business that she had started by staring dreamily into a ramschackle building was not so tiny. During the year ended Sept. 30, 2013, revenue from performances totaled $321,122, though after expenses the opera house lost $35,545.

She was born Martha Beckett in Greenwich Village on Aug. 9, 1924, the only child of Henry Beckett, a reporter for The New York Post and other newspapers, and the former Helen Brown, who at one time owned a furniture store. Her parents separated when Martha was young, and her mother took her to live in Pennsylvania before returning to Manhattan.

Young Martha was precociously creative. She wrote plays under the pseudonym of a Russian peasant. She played the piano. She danced.

“Ballet could absorb all of me, physically and spiritually,” she wrote in her memoir. “In dance I am the instrument instead of the player of the instrument. In painting, there again, I am the only eye behind the brush. In dance, I become the painting.”

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The exterior of the opera house, in Death Valley Junction, Calif.Credit...Ann Summa for The New York Times

Her mother, persuaded that vaudeville was returning, pushed her to develop a nightclub act rather than finish high school. That began her dancing career.

She joined the corps de ballet at Radio City Music Hall. She tried to raise money to stage her own ballets. She danced on Broadway in the 1946 revival of “Show Boat,” then in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and “Wonderful Town.”

“Show Boat” marked a shift for her in how she defined herself. Thanks to misspellings in the program, Martha Beckett became Marta Becket.

“That’s me, I realized,” she wrote. “That was me all along, and now the truth is uncovered in the Playbill.” She was no longer the namesake of a grandmother she never knew and no longer her mother’s “little Martha.”

In the decade or so before she found Death Valley Junction, she led a peripatetic dancer’s life while also modeling and painting. (She also illustrated a book by George Balanchine about his ballets.) She went on the road with her one-woman shows, traveling with Mr. Williams, who became her manager.

But their marriage gradually fell apart, and they divorced in the mid-1980s, by which time another man, Tom Willett, a genial jack-of-all-trades, had found his way to Amargosa. He became her close friend and onstage comic foil until his death in 2005.

Ms. Becket could not dance forever — for a few people or a capacity house of just over 100. Her body eventually began to wear out, through age and injuries. Her ballets became sit-down shows. A few dancers succeeded her.

Jenna McClintock, who was inspired to pursue a ballet career at age 6 when she and her family visited the Amargosa, joined the company for two seasons before moving to another project in nearby Tecopa, Calif.

“It was a dream come true to be in her opera house, to perform her ballets and to be with her,” Ms. McClintock said in an interview. “If I didn’t get it right, I wasn’t going to perform it. I had to get all her characters down. When I did, she loved it.

“She was always appreciative; she had a bit of Parkinson’s, so it was hard for her to clap. But she would.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Marta Becket, Dancer in the Desert, Is Dead at 92. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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