We can’t say we weren’t warned. Boubs, the narrator of Rajiv Joseph’s new play, kicks off the show by informing the audience that “all of it is true. Or most of it, anyway.”
That “most of it” does a lot of work in “Dakar 2000,” which just opened at Manhattan Theater Club. But while ambiguity and uncertainty have long been great fertilizers for storytelling, Joseph’s two-hander about a couple of Americans in Senegal remains strangely uninvolving.
Some of the things Boubs (Abubakr Ali), a Peace Corps volunteer, tells the State Department employee Dina (Mia Barron, from “The Coast Starlight” and “Hurricane Diane”) may well be fabrications. Over the course of her friendly but insistent interrogation of Boubs, who was involved in a truck accident, we begin to suspect that Dina is no slouch, either, at fudging the facts.
“You’re a good liar!” she tells Boubs at one point. “I don’t begrudge that skill set.”
It’s a useful one for playwrights, too. Mining his own history, Joseph (“Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” “King James”) did go on a Peace Corps mission in Senegal after college, an experience he credits as instrumental in his becoming a writer. It’s unclear whether, as happens to this play’s hero, Joseph was ever asked to possibly fingerprint an alleged terrorist who was passed out, or maybe dead, in his hotel room. Has Joseph been the Le Carré of the Rialto all these years?
But while the possibility of exciting action always hovers on the periphery, May Adrales’s low-energy production is bereft of any tension. That is an achievement of some kind for a show dealing with covert operations, and one in which a character is traumatized (or claims to be) by the 1998 bombing of the United States embassy in Tanzania.
“Dakar 2000” begins promisingly as Dina grills Boubs about his accident, then starts making demands. It’s fun to watch her run rings around him, and Joseph and the cast keep the action moving as we ponder what Dina really wants, and whether Boubs is a useful idiot, a cunning faux-naïf, an idealistic young man, or all of the above. That Dina appears to be haunted by apocalyptic feelings — the play takes place during the chaotic, unsettled final lead-up to Y2K, when the world felt as if it was built on shifting sands — should make the stakes even weightier.
Instead of capitalizing on that loaded context, though, the play gradually deflates, unable to maximize its own premise and hampered by possibly self-serving moves — a raised eyebrow is the only possible reaction to the improbable notion that Boubs could manipulate the worldlier, more experienced Dina into getting what he needs.
“Dakar 2000” reminded me of an earlier Manhattan Theater Club offering, Erika Sheffer’s “Vladimir,” which played in October and focused on the travails of an investigative journalist in Russia. Both plays flaunt elaborate production designs that look good in the abstract but distract from the story instead of enhancing it (in “Dakar 2000” it’s Shawn Duan’s projections and the set by Tim Mackabee with its turntable and ostentatious elevated catwalk). Worse, both lapse into triteness as they try to deal with the intersection of the geopolitical and the personal.
Paradoxically, “Dakar 2000” loses the most steam when it leans on the flirtation between Boubs and Dina. Whether the characters actually are attracted to each other does not matter all that much, but we need to buy that they are at least pretending to be. Alas, the actors struggle to communicate the allure of seduction tinged by danger, and by the time we reach the borderline wacky climax, it feels as if we’re watching a misguided adaptation of Graham Greene by Shonda Rhimes. Though that could be more fun than what’s actually onstage.
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