I CARRY YOUR HEART WITH ME to be Presented at Horizon Theatre This Spring

Horizon Theatre Company will continue its 40th season with the Southeastern premiere of the winner of the 2024 Steinberg/ATCA New Play Citation play I Carry Your Heart With Me, running March 14 – April 5 (press opening March 21). Esther, a stenographer inside a top-secret Vietnam-era debriefing room, has a picture-perfect world until she encounters an airman whose story quite literally changes her life. As she captures the stories of non-coms and POWs freshly back from the front lines, Esther finds herself smack dab in the middle of a troubling investigation. With plenty of twists and turns along the way, this tour-de-force starring renowned Atlanta actor Carolyn Cook is a taut, suspenseful mystery that packs a real emotional wallop.
 
"This play is an extraordinary story of a formative year in one woman’s life and how it profoundly shapes her future," says Carolyn Cook. "Esther’s journey is one of both discovery and reckoning, and I’m honored to bring her story to life for Atlanta audiences. I hope they will find themselves as captivated as I was when I first read the script and could not put it down." 

In this solo play by Jennifer Blackmer, Carolyn Cook (Suzi Award for Best Actress for Horizon’s Time Stands Still, and Best Supporting Actress for Citizens Market, also Horizon’s solo show The Syringa Tree) commands the stage as Esther Shannon, looking back on her formative time in her early 20s as a government stenographer for the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War. Raised in a military family, Esther is now the new girl and best typist on the base, where she meets attractive officer Andy, who wines and dines her. Like her mother and grandmother before her, she seems destined to become a military wife and mother. Longing to make her father proud and to make a bigger difference, she thinks about taking her skills to Vietnam instead. Andy persuades her to stay stateside by pulling strings to get her a top-security clearance job on the base. Tasked with transcribing debriefings of POWs and non-coms returning from the front lines, she records their fractured memories of the war which seep into her and change her perspective on the world. Then Esther encounters a POW helicopter pilot whose story has a deep impact on her, ultimately causing a clash with her official duties and complicating her life. As she becomes entangled in an investigation, Esther grapples with her future in a suspenseful and emotionally charged journey.

A blend of fact and fiction, the play is inspired by playwright Jennifer Blackmer’s mother’s real-life experiences as a young stenographer with a similar job on the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base during the Vietnam War. Blackmer’s mother revealed some of her experiences to her daughter before she passed away suddenly in her early 60s, leaving the playwright to put together the pieces and imagine the rest of her story. Jennifer Blackmer’s plays have been produced Off-Broadway and across the country, and she serves as Professor of Theatre and Executive Director of the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry at Ball State University. Blackmer was in residence at Horizon in 2023 as one of the lead mentors in Horizon’s New South Young Playwrights Festival.