“We all know that we all hate the holidays,” says Tina Burner, the drag performer and comedian from New York City who starred in Season 13 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. “The last time I was in church it was called the Limelight,” she says, referring to the now-gone nightclub.

Her show, A Bitchmas Carol, puts a drag spin on Charles Dickens’s tale of a Christmas-loathing curmudgeon visited by a quartet of ghosts who teach him the true meaning of the holiday. In this version, Burner plays Ebenezer Scrooge.

Burner was tearing through Europe — on her way to Provincetown, where she’ll be performing during Holly Folly — when she talked with the Indie from Amsterdam last week. She was recovering from a night on the town with some drag queens from New York City.

As for her upcoming seasonal sourpuss role, “I’m going to take it and put it through some twists and turns from the perspective of a gay man and a drag queen,” she said. “Originally, I thought I would do a character like Eliza Scrooge or something, but I thought to myself, I’m already a hateful person, so I might as well just really lean into that.”

It’s a challenge not to roll your eyes at Burner calling herself hateful. If you’ve ever caught one of her performances, you know this self-proclaimed “hooker” has a big heart of gold.

Other characters in Scrooge’s story are also reimagined for the show. Scrooge’s business partner, Marley, will be recast as a recently deceased RuPaul. One can imagine Vanessa “Miss Vanjie” Mateo as Tiny Tim and Raja appearing as the ghost of Christmas Past. Burner, who will be playing all of the roles in this one-kween extravaganza, is sitting on those secrets. But she will say that her version of Tina Burner as Scrooge will play out scenes pulled from her own life.

While there have been some serious one-actor versions of A Christmas Carol — think Sir Patrick Stewart’s legendary no costumes, no props 1986 creation, or Broadway veteran Jefferson Mays’s 2018 tour de force first performed at the Geffen Theater in Los Angeles, in which Mays played more than 50 characters, including a potato — Burner is turning her version into a semi-autobiographical parody including costume changes and featuring both covers and original music.

“I like the risk of taking all of the responsibility for the success of my show,” said Burner. “I write it, direct it, there’s help with the music and costumes, but, essentially, it’s all up to me to make it work. I find that incredibly exciting.”

For Burner, this anti-Christmas holiday show is a return to more freewheeling days on stage before the fame from being on RuPaul’s Drag Race changed the way audiences saw her.

When she was cast on the show in 2020, she was performing on Instagram Live from her living room. “After you do Drag Race, you get very cautious about what you do and say, because now there’s this big spotlight on you,” Burner said. “I started holding back because I worried about what people would say. Now I’m in my zero cares era. In Bitchmas Carol, I’m trying to get back to who I was before Drag Race, the classic Tina Burner.”

Burner described an idyllic childhood in upstate New York that included zipping around a forest on a snowmobile to find the perfect Christmas tree. So, when did the anti-Christmas sentiment take hold?

“Obviously, deep inside, Christmas is very special to me,” she said. “But Christmas and the holidays are very commercial, and that’s just not what it means to me.” It’s that, and not the holiday itself, that she’s taking on in this performance. “And in the end, you’ll find out that I really haven’t hated Christmas all along,” she added.

Burner has been performing in Provincetown for only three years. What began as a short run at the Pilgrim House led to a full summer on the stage at the Crown & Anchor. Although Fire Island is closer to home, she found it didn’t have the invigorating energy of Provincetown.

Being on a small stage surrounded by the audience on three sides without a backstage area and with only limited technical support would be a challenge for some classically trained musical theater performers. But Burner has turned the Wave Bar into an intimate cabaret. One of the most impressive things about a Tina Burner show is her commitment to costume changes. Even when they’re done in a tiny space behind the light booth, she said, “I like to pull out all the stops.”

Before Burner headed to Europe, she was knocking on doors with Queers for Kamala. “I think of the people who fought for me to have my rights, so it’s time for me to fight for future generations to have their rights,” she said. During her travels across the pond, she’s seen a stunned reaction to America’s decisive swing to the political right: “People seem to be having trouble accepting that it really happened.”

Does she expect that the shift will fan the flames of anti-drag legislation? Burner is unsure but is ready to rumble if it does.

“I’m not going to sit there and take it quietly,” she said. “I don’t think any of us will. There’s one thing we know about our community. We’re resilient and very loud.”

Dickens in Drag

The event: Tina Burner’s ‘A Bitchmas Carol’
The time: Nov. 29 and 30, Dec. 5, 6, and 7 at 7 p.m.
The place: Crown & Anchor, 247 Commercial St., Provincetown
The cost: $35 general admission, $45 VIP, at onlyatthecrown.com