如果你were a suburban adolescent outsider in the late ’90s, and you wanted to broadcast your deviance, you went to Hot Topic. At that loud, dark store in the mall, you could don a spiked choker, fairy wings and elf ears, or a black T-shirt that read “I eat paint chips” and become someone else — or your true self. You could eye other shoppers and clerks and try to judge from their black lipstick and ripped lace whether they were legit believers (but in what, exactly?) or lame posers.

As a bustling marketplace for aspiring goths, Hot Topic is also a fertile setting for a gothic romance, which is one of the keen insights of “Are You Goth Enough to Be Haunted, Fall in Love With the Wrong Guy and Burn Down the Mall?”

Just picture it, the narrators of Claire Rice’s play enjoin us: Doesn’t a decaying, mostly empty mall circa 1999 feel a little haunted? And then there are the kind of young people who populate a Hot Topic: yearning for darkness and melodrama, perpetually on the cusp of something — in short, perfect gothic romance characters.

The Awesome Theatre production, which I saw Thursday, April 20, is equally sharp about the evergreen appeal of its genre. We, the audience, feel just as powerless over our lives as sweet, innocent protagonist Emma (Sidney McNulty) feels over hers. As she angles for a summer job at the mall; falls for her mysterious, older manager, John (Alex Trono); and locks horns with V (Nikki Nutterfield), who views working at Hot Topic as a life calling, it’s as if she’s gliding on tracks, beset by external forces. We audience members, says narrator Mary (Janelle Aguirre), “need to see someone with no control have a happy ending.”

There’s a lot of narrating in the show, and director Neil Higgins doesn’t make clear why we should care that Mary and co-narrator Edgar (Max Seijas) are dreaming up some story, evidently for no more than their own amusement and schadenfreude. (Who are these people, and is this whole play just some lazy afternoon for them?) Still, as they stage, then restage — complete with faux-rewind sequences — every narrative twist and turn, and then delight in the results, their reactions reflect and amplify your own. The way Aguirre cackles is worthy of Ursula in “The Little Mermaid,” and Seijas devises a whole vocabulary of excitement: skipping with glee, going breathless with anticipation, sending the voice into an opera singer’s register.

If some performances are sloppy and tentative — the kind of acting that just seems to hope for the best or that insists on a dramatic pause where none was earned — McNulty stands out as both ingenue and commenter on the ingenue. She makes crisp, communicative choices that beef up the text. She didn’t just say something weird; she could kick herself for it. She didn’t just finally stand up for herself; she feels very self-satisfied as a result — almost enough to sing herself a little tune.

While the actors don’t fully sell Rice’s big twist — they don’t seem quite confident enough in it, or to have lived enough in it, to make it believable — “Are You Goth Enough?” represents some of the best of 9-year-old Awesome Theatre, which was a regular at therecently closed PianoFight. Just because big, fancy companies probably wouldn’t stage a genre show set in a Hot Topic doesn’t mean that that kind of setting and story isn’t rich with drama and meaning. Awesome Theatre is, as its logo declares, for people who didn’t know they liked theater — including those of us who once searched for an identity by thumbing through racks of band T-shirts as death metal screamed from above and the rest of the mall beckoned beyond.

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com