Predictable Political Espionage in DAKAR 2000 — Review

“This is a story within a story, about a person within a person, in a time within another time…All of it…is true. Or most of it, anyway,” begins Manhattan Theatre Club’s production of Rajiv Joseph’s predictable and tonally incoherent new play Dakar 2000, currently playing at New York City Center Stage I, directed by May Adrales. Right away, we know we’ve been saddled with an unreliable narrator, whose version of the truth we’re about to see play out on stage. 

After surviving a car accident, in which he may have been illegally re-allocating government-issued resources, Boubs (short for Boubacar), a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal for the last 3 years, meets with steely State Department operative Dina Stevens in the final week of 1999. (An interesting side note: Rajiv Joseph himself spent 3 years in the Peace Corps in Senegal after college.) It’s the beginning of what’s meant to be a cat-and-mouse game, yet the actors lack the chemistry to make the relationship sexy or compelling and the power never really slips from Dina’s calculating hands to ever mark a real shift in their dynamic.

As Boubs, Abubakr Ali is charming, charismatic, and extremely watchable. He demonstrates an innate talent to shoulder the narrative of a play. Not only that, he embodies the character’s youthful naivety and desire to be useful and make a difference in a corrupt world. He may have a shaky relationship with the truth, but that’s only because he’s governed by his ideals, willing to stretch the truth in order to gain resources for the villagers he has grown close to over the last three years…or, at the very least, to make his stories more interesting. Boubs’ belief in the truth’s malleability is exactly what catches Dina’s eye. 

Mia Barron is stilted and serviceable as the cold and manipulative Dina. Joseph gives us a glimpse into Dina’s vulnerabilities, making her less of a stone cold operator and more human, but he does so in the most inconceivable ways. Dina makes it known that she’s very good at her job, someone who dots their i’s and crosses their t’s, yet in the next breath she’s providing loopholes for Boubs to skirt trouble (charmed by his innocence, I guess?), then getting drunk with him a few days later and accepting a flirtatious advance to look at the stars from his roof.

Joseph may want us to think that it’s all part of her grand plan but it’s not convincing. Even if we are to believe every move of hers is a calculation, each vulnerable confession another layer of manipulation, it strips Dina of any humanity.

A week before Boubs flipped the car he was driving, Dina was relocated from Tanzania after the U.S. embassy there was bombed. All of the people she’d come to love died in that attack. As the sole survivor, she has a personal stake in seeing whoever’s responsible brought to justice.

“Except it’s not justice,” says Dina. “If I’m being honest with myself, it’s vengeance.”

If there’s one thing this play does successfully, it’s to zoom in on the individual working in an opaque apparatus such as the U.S. State Department. Dina may be a hard worker but her personal drive for vengeance is bloodthirsty and cruel and colored by bias. This becomes especially clear after hearing her point to “the growing trend of Islamo-Fascism” and refer to the places she’s been on assignment in Africa as “backwater stinkbomb slums.” It would be nice to think that the people tasked with enacting U.S. foreign policy were doing so at an emotional remove. The truth, I have to imagine, would probably make us all queasy.

As Dina puts it: “Until a stranger murders someone you love, you will never understand what I’m talking about, because it is like...The people who did this must die. It is normal to feel this way. Historically, it’s been the guiding principle of most foreign policy.”

Billed as a thriller, one might expect twists or even an unexpected secret or two. Unfortunately, this is not the case here. When Dina unofficially enlists Boubs in what she generously refers to as “field work,” the audience is already miles ahead of the play. Adrales keeps the pace quick, perhaps hoping the faster the play moves, the less time the audience will have to reflect on its vexing implausibility. 

Would it confuse things further if I were to mention that most of it is played for laughs? Boubs and Dina are an unexpected duo and there’s plenty of comedy to mine there, but neither Joseph nor Adrales can quite square it with the play’s cynicism. However, it’s a feat we all know Joseph to be capable of: his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is a bold and harrowing look at the Iraq War that still manages to be quite funny. 

Tim Mackabee’s rotating set skillfully evokes the Senegal of Kaolack, the small city where Boubs has been stationed, and Dakar, the capital. A corrugated metal wall surrounds the rounded stage and transforms beneath Shawn Duan’s projections.

Dakar 2000 takes place on the precipice of a new millennium, in the shadow of Y2K—a time when experts thought we could be hurtling toward the end of the world. In the play’s final moments, Joseph tries to draw a line from there to our present moment but then waffles on it. 

“Maybe everything is gonna be okay,” says Boubs,  “and this is just the normal sense of apocalyptic fear that has hovered over every moment in human history. Or...maybe it IS the end of the world.”

Maybe, maybe not. I don’t expect Joseph, or anyone, to have the answer to such a question, but after an evening of half-hearted attempts to parse out what it means to have purpose in what feels like a meaningless world, the ending is just another letdown.

Dakar 2000 runs through March 23rd at City Center Stage I.