Almost 40 years have passed since Marta Becket took an empty building in an abandoned town at the eastern edge of Death Valley and turned it into the Amargosa Opera House.
Now a Las Vegas-based art group has secured a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to try to ensure that Becket's creation lives on after she is gone.
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The 18-month, $10,000 grant was awarded late last month to the board of directors for the Goldwell Open Air Museum, an outdoor sculpture collection near Beatty, about 115 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The group plans to spend the money on an architectural study to determine what it will take to preserve the Opera House and the rest of Death Valley Junction, Calif.
It is hoped the study will one day lead to the establishment of an artists' community at the desert crossroads 75 miles west of Las Vegas.
"It's absolutely amazing. The NEA doesn't fund little groups like Goldwell," said Suzanne Hackett-Morgan, one of the sculpture museum's founding board members. "That's what sort of blew my socks off."
At age 81, Becket still performs about once a week at the opera house, where she sings and dances among the intricate murals she painted to make the old borax company recreation hall look like the an Elizabethan theater.
Though her long-time co-star and off-stage partner, Thomas Willett, died last year at age 77, Becket has announced no plans to hang up her ballet slippers.
"It's all up to her. It's her body. It's her health," Hackett-Morgan said.
Ultimately, though, someone has to prepare the Amargosa Opera House for life without Becket.
"Fortunately, she's got a lot of friends who want to see this place preserved," said Hackett-Morgan, who also serves on the opera house's board of directors. "What we're doing with this NEA grant is the first step."
One of those friends is Los Angeles resident Bob Steward, who made his first visit to the opera house about 15 years ago and has been a booster since.
Steward works as a professional fundraiser for a group of community health clinics, and he volunteered to help drum up the almost $12,000 in matching funds needed to make the architectural study possible.
He doesn't expect to have much trouble. "I think this is a national art treasure," he said of the opera house.
"This is really one of the last great desert expressions of individuality."
The goal of the study and where it might lead is to "preserve Marta's artistic legacy" at Death Valley Junction, not find someone to replace her on stage when she stops performing, Hackett-Morgan said.
"No one can replace Marta (Becket) and Tom (Willett)," Steward said. "We all recognize that you can't put things in a mason jar and keep them the way they are. The idea is to continue her legacy by expanding Death Valley Junction as an artists' venue."
Pacific Coast Borax Company developed Death Valley Junction in the 1920s to provide housing and office space for its operations in the area.
It had been mostly abandoned when Becket first saw it during a Death Valley vacation in 1967. As the story goes, she peered into the abandoned theater through a hole in the back door, and she was hooked.
She performed there for the first time on Feb. 10, 1968.
Thirteen years later, Death Valley Junction was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but only as a site of state-level significance.
Hackett-Morgan hopes to change that.
"Because of Marta Becket's work, the place has the potential for national significance," she said.
Such a distinction would qualify the site for additional federal grant assistance.
The grant-funded study should take about a year. When it is done, the Goldwell board will have a better idea what it will take to restore the sprawling adobe structure that houses Becket's theater and 14-room hotel.
The study also will look at how best to protect Becket's murals and what can be done to prop up the two dozen other buildings that still stand on the 119-acre site.
Eventually, Hackett-Morgan hopes to see Death Valley Junction emerge as the beating heart of a cultural corridor stretching along 100 lonesome miles of the Nevada-California line, from the Goldwell Open Air Museum to the budding arts community in Tecopa, Calif.
"We kind of thumb our nose at state lines. We don't see this as part of California or part of Nevada," she said. "We see that whole eastern edge of Death Valley -- the Amargosa Desert or whatever you want to call it -- as kind of one thing."
Hackett-Morgan also envisions a day when a museum dedicated to Becket opens next door to the inexplicable opera house she built in the desert. But no one is talking about that now, least of all Marta herself.
As Becket wrote in her recently published autobiography "To Dance on Sands:" "I'm determined to keep going as long as I can. I'll dance on one leg if the other stops working."
