Review: YOU CAN'T KILL A STORY Recalls Arizona's Day of Infamy

Theater comes in many forms, one of which is an interactive and interpretive testimonial of true witnesses to a human drama. Such was the experience on a 100 plus degree night on the 40th Anniversary of a murder that, in the minds and words of the storytellers, transformed a city and the lives of its inhabitants.

On Wednesday, June 2nd, 1976, a bomb detonated under the Datsun of Don Bolles, one of the Arizona Republic's preeminent investigative reporters, in the parking lot of what was then names Clarendon House. The next day, the headlines shouted, Republic writer is maimed in gang-style car bombing."

In the words of Ben Tyler, the founder and executive director of the Arizona Centennial Theatre Foundation and the producer of YOU CAN'T KILL A STORY: THE MURDER OF DON BOLLES, "What comes after that date has the scope of a Russian novel. Dozens of characters and hundreds of pages." All the players were gathered up and prosecutions completed, and yet there remains a mystery unsolved.

YOU CAN'T KILL A STORY gathers nine storytellers and a balladeer to recount the horrifying experience of that day. On the roof of what is today the Clarendon Hotel, in a mix of scripted and extemporaneous remembrances, a historian, former reporters, investigators, and Bolles' widow shape with texture and granularity the emotions and impact of the day and its aftermath. Arizona's Official Balladeer, Dolan Ellis, concludes the narrative with a song especially written for the occasion ~ Six Sticks of Dynamite ~ that ends with a sobering reminder to all who might wish to suppress the press: You can kill the man, but you can't kill the story.

YOU CAN'T KILL A STORY: THE MURDER OF DON BOLLES is not only a moving and truly theatrical memorial to Don Bolles but it is also a compelling tribute to the power and imperative of a free and unfettered press, particularly in a day and age when the press is under attack. Hopefully, Tyler will fulfill his dream of further developing it into a full play.

Photo credit to Arizona Centennial Theatre Foundation

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