Theater Review: Rajiv Joseph’s ‘Dakar 2000’

For a tense, 90-minute two-hander, Dakar 2000 has an awful lot on its mind. The play is a thriller about a Peace Corps volunteer caught up in a State Department official’s schemes in Senegal, an anxiety piece about people facing what they think will be the Y2K apocalypse, an exaggerated memoir that comes with lived-in detail, and a meditation on American interventionism abroad that strains to wink at current events. From the jump, it’s obvious that the playwright Rajiv Joseph has an unstable isotope on his hands, having tried to stuff too many ideas into the nucleus of one little drama, but as varied as his ambitions are, the overloaded quality has a certain rangy appeal. “This is a story within a story, about a person within a person, in a time within another time,” Joseph’s narrator, Boubacar, an idealistic but listless 25-year-old nicknamed “Boubs,” says, kicking off the play. Apologetically reversing that purple prose, he adds, “in a galaxy far, far away.”

Boubs seems to be a stand-in for Joseph, who did serve in the Peace Corps in Senegal around the turn of the millennium and gave his lead character a writer’s fondness for spinning a good yarn at the expense of actual fact. In that opening speech, Boubs looks back at the events of the play, teasing us with hints that, in a life of wandering aimlessly around the globe, he’s taken to picking up mini-missions as a “glorified delivery boy” passing along envelopes and jump drives. They arrive through encrypted emails on the orders of unnamed masters. Maybe he killed someone on one of those missions along the way. Maybe not. “That’s an example of something that isn’t true,” Boubs mugs, after telling a story about poisoning a man with an ink pad, details of which recur later on in Dakar 2000. “It would be a better story if it did happen, but it didn’t. I’m sorry.” The driving question becomes is Boubs lying about the missions, or is he lying about lying?

That sort of metafictional premise can drag a play into sophistry really fast, and it’s a recurring fascination for Joseph, who tends to lacquer his historical dramas with prose-poetic musings that veer into magical realism (successfully, in Describe the Night and his big breakout, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, or blurrily, in Guards at the Taj). Here, Joseph’s poetics tend vague — his characters are fond of pondering whether the universe is just a simulation, whoa, dude — but at least the actors are strong anchors. Abubakr Ali, who was such a great antagonizing presence in Toros, leans on Boubs’s puffed-up charisma, playing a guy who talks a big game — he does a twiddling motion with his fingers as he describes an adventure that’s like a sommelier emphasizing a wine’s terroir — but is clearly terrible at follow-through. (Credit to costume designer Emily Rebholz, who has given him a leather bracelet that tells you everything you need to know.) In the play’s first true scene, he’s ended up in the office of an embassy official named Dina, with a comically large bandage on his head, after flipping his truck on the way to deliver materials to build a garden in a remote village. Mia Barron, as Dina, interrogates him with a brusque blank American professionalism that masks the catlike way she lures him into tripping over his own lies. It turns out that he’s misappropriated fencing and cement for his little project, and was also probably driving drunk on pastis. She could bring down punishment on him. Or — and you can feel the claw of imperialism descending — he could owe her a favor. Under May Adrales’s direction, Barron and Ali build Boubs and Dina’s dynamic toward an intriguingly uneasy alliance. They’re using each other, they both know they’re using each other, and yet they also enjoy each other’s company. In the midst of passing those favors back and forth, they develop a fondness for each other, which is hard to buy when Joseph pushes it toward romance but works well in a more intermediate zone. You do buy that two lonely people stuck on thankless tours abroad would be happy to flirt on a rooftop to pass the time.

Yet Dakar 2000 doesn’t accelerate from there. Joseph works additively, tacking on new ideas about Dina and Boubs’s dynamic, then explores them incompletely. Dina’s backstory, for instance, involves the bombing of the U.S. embassy in Tanzania in 1998. She’s become obsessed with the threat of Islamic terror and her own quest for revenge. But because Joseph has placed his drama at such a specific historical spot — a year before 9/11 — it’s as if it’s hermetically sealed. He can only hint at how Dina’s perspective would soon become the standard posture of American diplomacy. Similarly, there’s the question of why Boubs would be so willing to take up field work in the first place. Joseph suggests that there’s something tantalizing for a young man without much else going for him to get a little direction in life. “It’s a powerful temptation to be told ‘you are useful,’” he says at one point. “It’s a powerful temptation to be told ‘we need you.’” As an observation, it’s not necessarily wrong — sure, it’s easy to get caught up in that machine because you want an adventure — but it doesn’t cut very deep. You want something more specific, especially when the play is so freighted with other context, intentionally and not. This play happens to be premiering right as funding for pretty much all forms of American international-development work is being gutted, something Joseph couldn’t have anticipated, but that does make this modest probing of ethics feel quaint.

All that could be better justified, however, if the thriller element of Dakar were more fully fleshed out. Near the end of the play, Dina sends Boubs off on one of those missions. Adrales stages the scene with a good amount of shadowy dread, but Joseph, so enamored of that maybe-or-maybe-not structure, only half-commits to the stakes of the thing. Should we feel that Boubs is really in danger, or is he just pulling our legs? Does he really do something bad on Dina’s behalf, or is this just normal operating procedure? Is that procedure itself bad? Because Joseph wants so much to be possible, the play can’t commit to a full gesture. He’s self-imposed too much on the work.

In fact, the final element of the thing might be the most restricting. Joseph has said that Dakar 2000 is in part autobiographical, although — I assume — significantly exaggerated in details of that spywork. (Though admitting to espionage via an Off Broadway premiere would be a good bit.) But in taking his time in Senegal as material, Joseph seemingly bound himself to a certain level of fidelity about those circumstances, which can be its own restriction. “I had never written anything autobiographical — and I’m never doing that again,” he told TheaterMania, admitting that in earlier drafts he had “added in too many details that meant nothing to an audience.” This, too, is a case of maybe or maybe not. I’d be curious to see the version of Dakar 2000 that is all in on those specifics, homing in on whatever smaller-scale experience inspired Joseph in the first place. And I’d also like to see the version of the play that abandons any obligation to fact and becomes lurid and combustible. But the version, as it exists now, can’t fulfill both those objectives at once.

Dakar 2000 is at MTC at New York City Center through March 23.