Art Bloomed in the Desert
Directed by Todd Robinson

The Boston Globe
by Jay Carr
September 10, 2000

Long before anybody invented the term performance art, Marta Becket was doing it, in an abandoned opera house in Death Valley Junction. She restored it and it restored her. Todd Robinson's "Amargosa" (the town's original Spanish name) is a remarkable documentary about an even more remarkable life that captures the glories and the costs of a life of artistic endeavor. Becket, a lithe 76, trained as a dancer, appeared in the Broadway musicals "Wonderful Town" and "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," and danced as well in Radio City Music Hall's corps de ballet.

But life (which included a 10-year timeout to care for a loving but emotionally needy mother) did not begin for her until she was 43. While driving cross-country with her husband, she happened upon the structure, learned she could rent it for $45 a month, and did. Her friends and colleagues thought her crazy, but something in her wanted to escape the New York rat race. Far from seeming a desert eccentric, Becket emerges as uncommonly single-minded and exceptionally lucid. After lovingly restoring the opera house, right down to covering the walls with trompe l'oeil murals depicting imagined indigenous audiences, Becket set to work devising dances and theater pieces.

Her husband, resentful of her immersion in her art, left. She stayed, used the isolation to deepen her art, and flourished. In 1980 she bought the crumbling town originally built by a borax mining company, including its haunted motel. With serene tenacity, she set down roots, working hard for decades, caring as well for endangered animals, including wild burros, until the world began coming to her. This sensitive, insightful film conveys as few do the effort demanded by a life of art. It ends on an elegiac note as Becket and the locals muse on the future of the place, which seems likely to go back to being a ghost town without her sustaining energy, will, and spirit. Meanwhile, it touchingly celebrates Becket's vision and courage.

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