Review: Horizon’s ‘Carry Your Heart’ shows nuances of traumatic memory

Carolyn Cook delivers an absolute powerhouse solo performance in playwright Jennifer Blackmer’s I Carry Your Heart with Me, onstage at Horizon Theatre through April 5. She is one of Atlanta’s best actors, and this is a terrific showcase for her talents.

Blackmer’s script follows a young military stenographer named Esther at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, during the Vietnam War. Esther, a skilled typist who grew up in a military family, is passionate, smart and wants to do work that makes some impact upon the world, in part because she wants to impress her distant father. Very quickly, she grabs the attention of a handsome officer named Andy, and her love life and work life become entwined as she’s assigned to a top-secret job doing live transcription of interviews with returning prisoners of war.

While Esther is telling us her story from her perspective, her narrative is often interrupted with tense scenes of an interrogation, which she was subjected to after an incident that may have compromised her integrity and national security.

Cook effectively emphasizes the character’s youth and emotional vulnerability, giving her an innocent glee as she excitedly tells stories about attending dances and first kisses. Esther is deeply empathetic to the stories she hears from the POWs — some of whom suffered unimaginable torture and have difficulty confessing it in front of her — and their stories remind her of her own childhood trauma. Meanwhile, her quest to be an independent, strong person is compromised by Andy’s sexual desire and belief about what roles women should fill.

Cook’s performance involves her embodiment of the other characters, particularly the returning soldiers telling their harrowing tales. Those stories are terrifying, and Cook evokes their wounds in her body and voice.

The best moments of changed physicality occur abruptly as the story shifts from Esther’s telling to the audience to her interrogation by military officials. Not only does the lighting design from Mary Parker and the projection design by Victoria Nation adjust at those moments, Cook’s posture becomes severe; her glance shifts. She becomes defensive, scared. It’s quite jarring, well blocked and directed by Lisa Adler. 

Adler’s terrific pacing helps the story build suspense. The mystery is legitimately engrossing. Blackmer took the story from her mother’s remembrances of her time as a stenographer, though some of the events of this play have been fictionalized. 

Lines from the script referring to memory as a shattered mirror influence the set design of Isabel and Moriah Curley-Clay. Though the set is sparsely decorated, the cracks in the walls of the interrogation room suggest that this play itself is a memory emerging from trauma.

I Carry Your Heart with Me is worth seeing for Cook’s impressive work and Horizon’s solid staging.

Where & When

I Carry Your Heart with Me is at Horizon Theatre through April 5. Tickets $30. 1083 Austin Ave.

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Benjamin Carr is an ArtsATL editor-at-large who has contributed to the publication since 2019 and is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the Dramatists Guild, the Atlanta Press Club and the Horror Writers Association. His writing has been featured in podcasts for iHeartMedia, onstage as part of the Samuel French Off-Off Broadway Short Play Festival and online in The Guardian. His debut novel, Impacted, was published by The Story Plant.