April 6, 1999

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. 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. The temperature climbs to near 120 degrees in the summer, and the wind actually whistles when it blows, which is nearly all the time.

The population is 10. The nearest restaurant is seven miles north, at the casino on the Nevada border. The nearest gas station is 16 miles beyond that. There's no post office or general store. But amazingly there is a working theater. 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.

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. On its small stage, Ms. 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. She creates two new shows a year and puts on some 50 performances between October and May. 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.

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. Ms. 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. Without a real audience, Ms. Becket explained, ''I said, 'I will paint an audience on the walls, an audience of the past.' ''

Though she still operates on a shoestring and worries about expenses, things are hardly so desperate now. Her performance work -- which mixes movement, narration, classical music and the presumptuous spirit of a diva -- is idiosyncratic and earnest. But like the plays staged by the teen-age hero of the film ''Rushmore,'' it is compelling in its serious effort.

And the opera house continues to draw audiences from the tourists at the Furnace Creek Inn, on the floor of Death Valley, some 30 miles away; from the city of Pahrump, Nev., a 55-mile drive away, and even from Las Vegas, over 100 miles away by road. One Monday night a performance of her latest creation, ''The Dollmaker,'' a fable about a baron who falls in love with a doll, drew about 80 people, at $10 a head, including many who were cheering Ms. Becket for the umpteenth time.

''This is our sixth visit,'' said Pamela Krajnik, who with her husband, Gary, was taking their annual vacation from the family farm in Nampa, Idaho. ''It's just phenomenal that there's something like this here.''

Todd Robinson, who is making a documentary film about Ms. Becket, said: ''There's something really wonderful about the fact that she picked the most desolate spot in America to do this. It says you can have your life on your own terms, but you'll have to sacrifice. It says the process is the point. And people come away from there inspired.''

There is indisputably a whiff of eccentricity about Ms. Becket's enterprise. And if one might expect the woman herself -- dark haired, trim, with the visible sinews of a dancer -- to carry an eccentric air, she doesn't, though there is a faint haughtiness of the artiste about her. Ms. Becket is self-aware, perfectly willing to admit that her shows and her painting have been her obsessions. In explanation of what amounts to her self-imposed exile, she said, ''I couldn't have created another world anyplace else.''

''Am I eccentric?'' she asked. ''Is it eccentric to love your work so much that you would go anywhere in the world to do it?''

A Story of Fate Guiding Her Steps

Like theater people everywhere, Ms. Becket knows a good story, and she's savvy enough to understand that her best story is her own. It is recounted at length in a glossy pamphlet for sale at the opera house, and in abbreviated form it is told aloud at the start of each production. And she doesn't mind telling it herself. In any version the sense that her destiny lay in Death Valley is resonant.

Ms. Becket was born in Greenwich Village and grew up largely in New York City. A child dancer, she quit high school during World War II and began performing in nightclubs. Eventually she won jobs at Radio City Music Hall and in Broadway shows like the 1946 revival of ''Show Boat'' and ''A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,'' a musical starring Shirley Booth. But for two decades she led the itinerant life of a dancer, auditioning, going on the road, living with uncertainty.

She found work as an illustrator and even had art dealers express interest in her paintings, but on the two occasions she was to have had gallery shows, fate intervened. She said the first was Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the second was Nov. 10, 1965, the day after the city lost electrical power and blacked out.

Meanwhile she was developing a repertory of solo dance-mimes, as she called them, and by the mid-60's she was touring, performing in community centers and on college campuses, gigs booked by her manager and husband, Tom Williams. It was during a break on such a tour that they camped in Death Valley and awoke one morning to find their trailer had a flat. To repair the tire, they had to nurse the three-wheeled trailer the 30 miles to Death Valley Junction, where there was then a filling station.

While her husband repaired the tire, Ms. Becket explored the village, most of which had been built by the Pacific Coast Borax Company between 1923 and 1925 to serve as company offices, employee dormitories, a dining room and a hotel. The company sold the town in the late 40's. What Ms. Becket saw the day she arrived was more or less what the company built and what still exists today: a Mexican-style collection of adobe houses dominated by a low-slung, three-sided structure surrounding a courtyard, with a long colonnade at its center. At the end of one wing was an abandoned two-story building once used as a social hall but that Ms. Becket immediately envisioned as something else.

''It was a theater! I couldn't believe it,'' she wrote in her biographical pamphlet. ''It seemed to be the only unused building in Death Valley Junction.'' Peering through a hole in the door at the rubble inside, she wrote, ''I had the distinct feeling that I was looking at the other half of myself. The building seemed to be saying, 'Take me, do something with me, I offer you life.' ''

And so she did, and so it did. She and her husband rented the place and left New York for good, refurbished it, renamed it the Amargosa Opera House -- amargosa, Spanish for bitter, was the name of the town before 1907, when the Borax Company arrived -- and created a new life there. She hasn't been back to New York since 1970, when her father died.

''In New York it was like door after door was closing in my face,'' she said. ''When I came here, there was no door to close. All along I knew all I needed was a space, a place where I could say, 'If people come, good, but if they don't, I'm going to do my work anyway.' The first three years I danced whether anyone was here or not. The effort is the joy.''

Since then she has formed a nonprofit corporation that owns the opera house, the hotel (Ms. Becket's trompe l'oeil paintings adorn the lobby walls and 14 guest rooms) and the buildings around them. The former gas station is now leased by a mining company; gold speculation is persistent around here.

A New Partner, At Least in Theater

Her marriage eventually failed. Ms. Becket now shares much of her time, if not a romance, with Thomas J. Willett, 71, a former mailman and factory worker who arrived at the Amargosa as a maintenance man in 1983, shortly before Ms. Becket's husband left town. When he did, Ms. Becket asked Mr. Willett to step in as stage manager, ticket taker, M.C. and general amanuensis.

''I bought him a nice velvet suit and sent him up there,'' Ms. Becket said. ''Jan. 14, 1983, was our first performance together, and he was scared stiff.'' But Mr. Willett got over his stage fright. With his lumbering gait, wry manner, growly voice, thick features that are reminiscent of the actor James Gammon and a willingness to parade around on stage in peculiar robes and funny hats, he soon ended up in a variety of supporting roles in Ms. Becket's shows. He's found it suits him; he now performs under a stage name: Willget.

''I was in Dawson City in the northern Yukon, and I was recognized,'' Mr. Willett said proudly.

Ms. Becket lives with 10 cats in a large house near the theater with a dance studio downstairs and a painting studio upstairs and enough property for horses, chickens and peacocks to run free and still come around to be fed. She said she'd like to see the town, which has buildings on only 5 of its 268 acres, be officially designated a refuge for wild horses.

She's not a hermit; she has five employees, and she knows some dancers in Las Vegas who have come to see her shows. Still, she has more or less renounced the company of other artists.

''If I had known other artists who are obsessed as I am, that would be interesting to me,'' she said. ''But I've never met any. I'd dance on one leg if the other didn't work.''

Her health is good; business is good enough. Still, she thinks cautiously about the future. She said she'd like the Amargosa complex, after she's gone, to become a retirement community for dancers. ''But so many dancers would rather live where the lights are,'' she said.

Copyright 1999 The New York Times.