In her powerful one-woman show “Belfast Blues,” Geraldine Hughes tots up the real costs of growing up in a war zone. As a tiny child, she weathered the worst of the Catholic-Protestant battle over Northern Ireland. Living first in the compound-like Divis Flats (where the first child casualty of the Troubles died) and then an apartment on the Peace Line itself, hers are memories of the front lines.

When she can block out the sounds of live ammunition, Ms. Hughes’s memories are charming and nostalgic. Even dodging apartment police as she helps her family run an illegal shop has the glint of remembered adventure. But as the family resolutely tries to have a normal life, horror creeps in. Constantly admonishing his wife not to panic, Geraldine’s father drinks himself to death. Men fling themselves off rooftops and land outside the family’s windows.

What’s terrible is that people can adapt to even the most gruesome of circumstances. By refusing to sentimentalize the fighting or to retroactively give her young self a political conscience, Ms. Hughes’s makes her frank narration seem all the more horrifying. As the young Geraldine rejoices over an unlooked-for sweet or curses Jesus for her soiled communion dress, she shows us just how forcefully normalcy inserts itself in the fiercest chaos.

Portraying a dozen different characters, from the lovable, blinking Eddie to a nose-picking neighbor boy, Ms. Hughes employs her versatile physicality to populate her neighborhood. Everyone seems dear – even a gun-toting British soldier reminisces about cream buns -but the Troubles don’t let anyone lie quiet. Her mother, sweet and unassuming, totes a bomb in a cakebox, and the grown ups won’t let each other forget that “we’re at war.”

Ms. Hughes scavenges humor from almost every situation, but even her bright optimism can’t withstand men being shot on her doorstep. The terrible guilt she seems to feel over grabbing for survival and abandoning her native land is only one of the prices she has paid. Like nuclear fallout, a constantly explosive environment goes on to affect the innocent well after the cessation of hostilities.

The poisons of persistent hatred, oppression, and shock can’t help but seep into a young system. Ms. Hughes, though she now seems as balanced and sane as the best of us, confesses that her childhood taught her how to hate. Though she escaped her hellhole for the welcoming arms of California, her cathartic, troubling show tells of the cost.

Until March 27 (45 Bleecker Street at Mott Street, 212-307-4100).