CHICAGO — As holiday traditions go, the play “Burning Bluebeard” doesn’t exactly seem like a natural: no Cratchits, no elves, no Grinches, no sugarplum fairies. Its place in the season is all about timing. It’s based on the real-life story of a fatal fire that happened in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day — and it’s told by clowns.

On Dec. 30, 1903, the blaze ripped through this city’s brand-new Iroquois Theater, killing about 600 people, almost all of them audience members. The show was a 3 p.m. matinee of the touring pantomime spectacle “Mr. Bluebeard,” and many of the dead were children and their mothers.

Such tragedy wouldn’t appear to be the stuff of holiday custom, but that’s what “Burning Bluebeard” — with its vaudeville-style tumbling, silly humor and Amy Winehouse lip-sync number — has become here since its 2011 premiere by the Neo-Futurists, an experimental company. Now produced by a collective called the Ruffians, the holiday show runs through Sunday at Theater Wit, in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago.

As the performance begins, the air is thick with haze, and the tattered, soot-smeared clowns onstage are very sorry. “You know how when you go to most Christmas shows and you’re sitting there and they don’t catch you on fire?” one asks the audience. “Well, we did the opposite of that.”