Sometimes the only way to look at the scope of human misery is to focus on its tiniest component — so the Chilean company Compañía Teatro Cinema places its “Gemelos” on a stage roughly the size of a four-poster bed. The miniature jewel box theater, with its luscious red velvet curtain and sliding dovetailed sets worthy of Drottningholm, creates a warm, wooden womb for the actors. They work in half-masks like commedia dell’arte characters, and move with a jerky waddle, like wind-up Charlie Chaplins. The snapshot impressions, such as the image of a wooden fish swimming through dappled shadows or a toy train rumbling eternally through the distance, achieve the pristine clarity of illustration-plates. But this is no children’s story.

A nameless set of twins, homeless because of a similarly nameless war, go to live with their granny. Naturally, this being a fairy tale, Grandma cackles like a crow and abuses them like a particularly grubby witch. But these matched Hansels don’t rely on pitiful resources like breadcrumbs—they immediately begin a soul-and-body toughening regime, cutting and cursing themselves until pain cannot hurt them. Soon they discard schoolboy morality and spy on their grandmother, intercepting her mail, and intimidating her into preparing their preferred dinner. Perversely, their toughness starts to win them her respect. By the time they try to assassinate the priest’s cook, she could almost call them her own.

Into every litany of disaster, a little Holocaust must fall — or at least that is the icily unemphatic way that history impinges on these twins. That train in the distance is, of course, headed to Dachau — but the piece treats it with the same weight as it does the boys going without their scarves. Having trained themselves not to feel pain, the twins sway the production toward an incredible, paradoxically moving, dispassion.

The play is Laura Pizarro, Juan Carlos Zagal, and Jaime Lorca’s loose adaptation of Agota Kristof’s terrifying “The Notebook,” the first in her trilogy about the mental dislocations of war. In some ways the team’s alterations are small mercies. They minimize the twins’ detachment in the face of suffering, edit the twins’ chilling treatment of their father, and abandon the twins before Ms. Kristof manages to yank apart their psychological integrity. Some of Ms. Kristof’s preoccupation with the written word worms its way back into the experience, an additional Verfremdung effect courtesy of simultaneous translation.

When even Robert Wilson, master of the impenetrably long stage-cross, finds himself directing pointed fairy tales (“Fables de La Fontaine”), a certain battle has been won for the children’s theater aesthetic. Not that “Gemelos,” with its darling puppet postman and winsome miniature windmill, should be seen by children. Sometime during the section about the disabled child being molested by a dog, parents might start feeling squeamish. But puppets and sweetness are a tactic, one that squirms under our anti-sympathy carapace. The Achilles’ heel of political theater has always been its earnestness. “Gemelos” avoids the problem by cutting off its earnestness at the knees.