LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE, Blue Star Performance Company, at the Church of the Atonement. This debut production delivers some of the best ensemble acting I’ve ever seen off-Loop. Caryl Churchill’s didactic 1976 study of England’s 17th-century civil wars ranges from touching to tedious, but the cast gathered by director Amy Ludwig for this Chicago premiere perform with unfailing emotional accuracy and intense but never overstated connection to one another and the text. Playing commoners whose lives are disrupted by the “holy war” that deposed one tyrant (King Charles I) and replaced him with several others (the military, Parliament, the Puritan dictator Oliver Cromwell), six fine young actors–John Harrell, Kathy Keyes, Sara M. Nichols, Nathan Rankin, Kevin Theis, and Christopher Tiffany–make even arcane economic, political, and religious issues immediate matters of life and death.
