Lite Fear

With all the energy of a salsa club, the Coterie’s Black Butterfly, Jaguar Girl, Piñata Woman and Other Superhero Girls Like Me is not so much produced as rocket-launched. It is a blast. Created by Luis Alfaro from the writings of Latina poets Alma Cervantes, Sandra Munoz and Marisela Norte, it is a live, streaming encyclopedia of Latina teen-agers’ anxieties at the turn of the century — a Telemundo version of Romper Room jamming through MTV’s satellite feed.

A quintet of East L.A. girls (played by Jennifer Aguilar, Angelique Kelley, Gabriela Lucas, Ashley Otis and Chilah Vintres) grow from ages twelve to sixteen and offer sixty minutes of random thoughts and experiences inspired by a classroom assignment to write a journal. What starts as a chore becomes the blueprint for short stories and several Top 10 lists. One such list begins with “Look at … ” and documents a neighborhood, down to crowded buses and a ’76 Monte Carlo in a driveway; another uses “I can’t wait to get older … ” to allow the girls to vent all their pubescent frustrations.

The writings are just surface musings, but this surface is so alive. Director Jeff Church and choreographer Liz Jeans exert a weird sort of carnival discipline on the show: Simple touches strategically disguise the show’s shallowness.

The bass-heavy spinning of DJ Miss Michaela (who was the resident DJ at the former Spark bar and is behind the board Mondays at the Hurricane) and the creative kaleidoscope of Ron Megee’s set and Shane Rowse’s lighting also keep the show in constant motion. Miss Michaela sits atop a funky ziggurat throughout the show. She roosts between a pair of slanted pillars lit floor-to-ceiling with white Christmas lights (the chunky retro kind) nestled within aluminum pot-pie pans. Across the vast set (made to embrace the audience in the colors of the Mexican flag) are paintings on black velvet, a chain-link fence and shelves holding products like dishwashing liquid and cereal with Spanish-language labels. The show pops before it even starts.

The noticeable lack of depth means these girls’ observations are more like what you’d find jotted on the cover of a diary than the introspection that might be locked inside. Teen pregnancy is addressed very briefly; gangs and the bruising consequences of cultural machismo get no mention. A piece about how a Twinkie stains a couch receives more weight than it deserves. When the show tries to offer more depth in a monologue about a father’s death, the scene fails, dropping on the otherwise buoyant show with a thud. The show has to that point been completely purchased from the candy counter; one meaty issue throws the cart off balance — briefly.

Teen-aged American girls are a big topic lately; only two weeks ago, The New York Times Magazine ran the cover story “Mean Girls — And the New Movement to Tame Them.” The girls of Black Butterfly … wouldn’t be in that article, though. They are their own harshest critics; they’re either too fat or too flat. Yet from the doubts of young women on the brink, the show builds excitement and energy. If only Britney Spears at her Crossroads had this much spice.

When the girls strut to a platform at center stage to deliver short speeches, they strike stern supermodel poses, then giggle at their own precociousness. It’s as if they’ve bought one of those novelty mirrors emblazoned with the title of a magazine — Elle or Vogue. For all their angst, they are beautiful, in their own eyes at least. And eventually that will be all that matters.

Post-Script: With the Hole song “Celebrity Skin” setting the beat, the Hobbs Building in the West Bottoms took off its drab work clothes and got its rocks off last week with the show Rock Bottoms. It was Late Night Theatre fans’ first look at the troupe’s new space, though the performance area is far from complete. The round plywood stage will no doubt be plush by the time The Stepford Wives opens there March 29. Rock Bottoms raised more than $2,000 toward new sound equipment (and Late Night’s new nonprofit status makes all contributions tax deductible).

Among the stellar performances were those of Gary Campbell, doing “Stand Back” as a prerehab Stevie Nicks; Stasha and Bill Case as Guns n’ Roses’ Axl Rose and Slash for “Sweet Child o’ Mine” (complete with Mrs. Case bearing a right-leaning package); and Jon Piggy Cupit ferociously taking on “Celebrity Skin.” A little Joan Jett, Liz Phair and Blondie filled out the show, with Missy Koonce doing her own vocalizing on a “Me and Bobby McGee” that could be her audition piece should anyone decide to mount the Off-Broadway hit Love, Janis.