Mia Barron, Abubakr Ali (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

Dakar 2000

By Julia Polinsky

Playwright Rajiv Joseph, who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and twice won the Obie, offer us Dakar 2000, a slick, twisty two-hander at Manhattan Theater Club's City Center venue. Set in the last few days before Y2K, which at this point feels like a kinder, gentler world, Dakar 2000 presents lies and spies and deals and ideals in a manipulative thriller that can't decide if it admires or deplores American diplomatic attitudes.

Darkly funny, Dakar 2000 manages to be even a little heartbreaking, as it tells all those lies. Or stories, if you like. From the show-framing monologue at the start, the engaging Boubs - yes, that's what he calls himself, and yes, it sounds like you think it does - tells you flat out that he lives a hidden life within his outer life, and that everything in the play is true, except what's not. Except it might be. Cue the flashback to how he got into that life.

For those who are a little iffy on African geography: Dakar is a city in Senegal; it's the farthest west point of Africa, and had a long history with the slave trade. Boubs (a splendid Abubakr Ali) is a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal; all of 25 years old in the flashback, he's a jejune idealist who wants desperately to do good in the world. To be needed. To be useful.

Mia Barron, Abubakr Ali (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

Enter Dina (Mia Barron), a State Department mucky-muck bureaucrat who has just transferred to Dakar from Tanzania, scene of an attack on the US Embassy the year before. She starts all matter of fact, listening to him talk about his do-gooder activities in the Peace Corps and the truck he recently overturned in a one-car accident at night on an empty road, then hones in on some sacks of cement that were on that flipped truck. She tells Boubs that cement belonged in a sense to her; that the State Department had sent him the cement and some fencing to reinforce his own home after the Embassy attack. Boubs had used fencing and cement for a garden project for a village he worked with instead. No matter the motive, Boubs re-purposed that cement, illegally. Boubs is going down for that, until Dina offers him a way out.

The details of that way out are not as important as the how Dina has established that Boubs is a good liar, that he can get things done, that she can manipulate him, and that he may be interested in impressing her and is OK with owing her a favor. She turns out to be more than the paper-pusher she seems, with a self-imposed mission to track down the people who bombed the Tanzania embassy, where her three best friends were killed.

Boubs and Dina also seem to share a strong sexual chemistry, so the seductions are multiple. Who's zooming who, here? The intensity of their nighttime rooftop flirtation (terrific projections from Shawn Duan and a knockout set from Tim Mackabee) lead to a hotel room assignation, which leads to multiple losses of innocence for Boubs. That loss of innocence leads, in turn, to the cynical, older Boubs' reflection on his younger self, framing D2K in speeches to the audience that reflect on the trouble we're in today, and that it may be even worse than it was then.

 

Mia Barron, Abubakr Ali (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

Mackabee's scenic design and terrific lighting from Alan C. Edwards, along with spot-on costumes from Emily Rehbolz, decorate the splendid dimensional spaces that appear on MTC's rotating stage. A curving ramp leads to the night sky; in separate zones on that stage, a bed, a desk, a small cafe table become a hotel room, an office, a restaurant. Director May Adrales moves her two actors expertly within and around these spaces as they dance around each other, using and being used, seducing and being seduced.

After the flashback is over, an older and perhaps wiser Boubs delivers a final framing speech about the trouble we're in today - a speech that provokes the audience to laugh here and there, but they're rueful laughs. That's a fitting frame for a beautifully performed, slightly uncomfortable play about, fundamentally, how well we lie to ourselves and others.

Dakar 2000

At Manhattan Theatre Club City Center

131 W. 55^th St.

Tickets:  https://www.nycitycenter.org/pdps/2024-2025/dakar-2000/