
From its invocation of Mean Girls to a soundtrack that dips into pump-up lady jams of the late ’90s (I hadn’t thought about Shirley Manson in YEARS, you guys), Action/Adventure Theatre’s latest serialized comedy, No Man’s Land, is a soothing balm for those of us who genuinely enjoy the teen comedies of a certain decade—I’m not talking about movies from the respectable John Hughes lineage, but something more akin to the trashy Tara Reid oeuvre, or the subtly smart movies of Amy Heckerling. If you grew up when Freddie Prinze Jr. was the nonthreatening love object plastered all over Teen People (this was before Teen Vogue, alas), you’ll find a lot to like in No Man’s Land, starting with the writing: Brenan Dwyer, Leon Anderson, and Sara Jean Accuardi have imbued the stock tale of the Catholic all girls’ high school misadventures of a would-be adolescent anthropologist (Zoë Rudman) with absurd humor and Angela Chase-adjacent quests for teenage identity.
