You know it's been a strong performance when you find yourself cringing in your seat from the action onstage. Just such an evening I had watching Irish Theater of Chicago's In a Little World of Our Own.

This play by Gary Mitchell set during the Irish "Troubles" premiered in 1998, following the Good Friday Agreement that year which put an uneasy end to the Catholic versus Protestant dispute in Northern Ireland. While memories may be fuzzy, the world at large - and the Irish neighborhoods of Chicago - were at the time emotionally and politically charged, and highly invested in the battles in Ireland. They still are invested.

The drama centers on an Irish Protestant family - less familiar terrain for Chicago - and incorporates a tense whodunit regarding a heinous murder, committed offstage, thankfully. Trapped in the claustrophobic community of one of Northern Ireland’s most notorious housing projects, family members wrestle with how to mete out justice on their own after one of three brothers is accused - the plot twists and turns as we try to determine what really happened on the evening in question. When the moment of truth arrives on The Den stage, I covered my head with my arms.

The production is a noble endeavor, and the Irish Theatre of Chicago continues its estimable mission in bringing us this staging. Directed by Associate Artistic Director Jeri Frederickson, and featuring ITC company members Jeff Duhigg, Matt Isler, Rob Kauzlaric, and Jodi Kingsley, this play will appeal to those who are willing to risk being challenged. One slight quibble would be in the Irish accented English, which performers mastered unevenly under coaching. Sometimes the playwright's language got lost in translation.

By way of background, in Northern Ireland, the British army was charged with keeping the peace, but neither Catholic nor Protestants trusted justice could be found through formal means - and so they took justice into their own hands. As the action unfolds at the Den Theater, we watch a Protestant family struggling with such a dispute - and not wanting to involve the formal authorities. In a Little World of Our Own holds up, after all this time, as a portrait of a society in dissolution - showing us the dire consequences for a community that has made its peace with such rough justice.

A quarter century before the play's premiere, the Bloody Sunday incident took place, in which 14 people were killed by British soldiers during a protest march in Derry, Northern Ireland. (It was around that time, in 1971, that Paul McCartney recorded his protest song, "Give Ireland Back to the Irish.")

From the late 1960s until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Ireland's "Troubles" - the political and social antipathy between the Catholic minority and Protestant majority in Northern Ireland - had a strong hold on the world's attention, and especially on Chicago, the largest Irish American city. Interventions and negotiations over the years have reduced the tensions in Northern Ireland to a largely uneasy peace.

These matters are far from settled. There are still 4,000 protest marches held each year by Catholic and Protestant groups in Northern Ireland, population 1.8 million. Playwright Gary Mitchell, who won the Belfast Drama Award, and the Irish Times Theatre Award for Best New Play for the work in 1998, was forced from his home in Rathcoole, Belfast in 2005, after it was attacked by Loyalist [loyal to British rule] paramilitaries. He now lives with his family in a secret location.