For his latest play at Manhattan Theatre Club, the immensely entertaining Dakar 2000, Rajiv Joseph has turned out a real rarity: an 80-minute, two-person theatrical spy thriller.
If you saw Joseph’s King James (2023), a LeBron-inspired bromance starring Chris Perfetti and Glenn Davis at MTC, or his Obie Award–winning Guards at the Taj (2015), a mid-17th-century-set meditation on friendship, duty, and tyranny that featured Omar Metwally and Arian Moayed, you know he can write a taut two-hander.
This time, he’s throwing it back to “a galaxy far, far away,” as our narrator/hero, a Peace Corps volunteer named Boubs (Abubakr Ali)—short for Boubacar, but yes, it’s pronounced like boobs—jokes: Senegal, 1999, on the eve of Y2K, on the edge of the unknown. Tech meltdowns, economic collapse, governmental implosion—everyone had a theory about what the millennium would bring. (No one thought we’d be facing the same prospects in 2025, but I digress.)
After flipping and totaling his truck late at night, Boubs finds himself at the U.S. Embassy in Dakar opposite Dina (Mia Barron), just arrived from Tanzania, who’s peppering him with questions about his accident. It seems like her job is to fill out paperwork. Or get to the bottom of things. Or get Boubs on her team. At first, she’s impressed, or acting like she’s impressed, by his initiative: “I’ve been working with this women’s gardening groupement in this village called Thiadiaye. I helped them build a fenced-in community garden,” he humble-brags. But it turns out he used government-issued cement for said community garden—a U.S. government no-no.
“Those bags of cement were my bags of cement. My office’s anyhow. They had serial numbers, we can track ’em,” Dina explains. “Look, normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but we’re staring down the barrel of Y2k in four days. Maybe it’s nothing, maybe it’s the end of the world…”
Of course, this isn’t really about cement. For Dina, everything is about getting to the bottom of the Aug. 7, 1998, attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. (The near-simultaneous truck bombs were later linked to al-Qaida.) The latter is the location of her last post, and it’s her mission—perhaps an off-the-books one—to track down the people who killed her three closest friends. So is she really going easy on Boubs for the cement violation? Is she actually into him, or is she flirting as a means to an end? Is she using his youth and innocence to manipulate him? Yes, yes, and yes—but there’s so much more to the story. No spoilers here. What we will reveal: Ali and Barron have terrific chemistry (don’t be surprised if you find yourself cheering for them to kiss on the roof!); and director May Adrales stages a genuine jump-in-your-seat moment, aided by Alan C. Edwards’ unnerving lighting design, that you’ll be thinking about for days.
Incidentally, Joseph spent a few years in the Peace Corps in Senegal. “All of it…is true,” Boubs tells the audience straight away. “Or most of it, anyway. Names have been changed. Some of the places have been changed. Some of the boring parts, snipped away. Some other stuff has been added to make it… theoretically more interesting. But otherwise all of it is almost entirely true.” Or is it? Joseph isn’t giving anything away. Considering that 2021’s Letters of Suresh (also directed by Adrales) was a follow-up to his 2008 ode to origami, Animals Out of Paper, a sequel to Dakar 2000 isn’t an unreasonable expectation…in 2038.
Dakar 2000 opened Feb. 27, 2025, at Manhattan Theatre Club and runs through March 23. Tickets and information: manhattantheatreclub.com
