Abubakr Ali and Mia Barron in Dakar 2000. Photo: © Matthew Murphy

It is not fair to Dakar 2000, a tight cat-and-mouse game about intelligence-gathering and power where it’s not always clear who’s cat and who’s mouse, that the world of American politics and diplomacy is operating at bonkers warp speed right now. Rajiv Joseph’s script is edgily propulsive; May Adrales’s direction tight, insinuating the right amount of ambiguity into the performances. Design elements, particularly Alan C. Edwards’s lighting and Bray Poor’s sound design, set a mood of tension and intrigue; Tim Mackabee’s set is clever and efficient. (Though on the less successful side, Shawn Duan’s wraparound projections feel superfluous rather than establishing time and place, and Emily Rebholz’s costumes are a little too literal.) But the play can’t help but feel much less suspenseful than reading the news every day, even—or perhaps especially—at Joseph’s most directly prophetic. 

In that vein, it also feels a little like rubbing salt in the wound, in this early March of 2025–as the US State Department is being dismantled before our eyes, measles is surging, tech broligarchs are running rampant through the key systems of our government, the NOAA is on the brink of privatization, and Afghanistan is once again run by the Taliban–to set a piece in and around an African embassy and speculate in dramatic form on which of the four “horsepeople” of the apocalypse is going to get us first: viral outbreak, climate catastrophe, cyberattack, or good old fashioned terrorism. It seems quaint to think back to New Year’s Eve 1999 and remember that, before smartphones, before ChatGPT, before Elon Musk pulled the levers of government, we’d thought a technological glitch might trigger nuclear holocaust, whereas now we might willingly hand over functions like protecting our nuclear arsenal to AI. If I’d seen Dakar even two weeks ago, it might have hit me differently. But now, I feel a little like it wants to have its apocalypse cake and eat it too—to consider seriously the end of the world while also indulging in a little nostalgia for one time we overestimated the consequences; to look at the cultural arrogance of thinking you could make a difference in the world while still building a suspenseful plot about personal vengeance against terrorism. Our present moment is moving so fast that the dramatic tension can’t possibly keep up. 

Boubacar (Abubakr Ali) is an ordinary guy who occasionally does a little bit of work that you might consider espionage. Eleven times in twenty-five years, he says from the vantage of Budapest, late 2024. Mostly in Eastern Europe. You get the feeling he lives an unsettled kind of life. But in 1999, he was a twenty-five-year-old Peace Corps Volunteer known as “Boubs” (yes, it’s pronounced how it looks; yes, he’s okay with the joke), three years into a tour in Senegal with not a lot to show for his time: a failed relationship with another PCV, a half-done garden project in a rural village. And, then, a few days before Y2K, he misappropriates a few supplies, flips his truck on a deserted country road, and finds himself in the crosshairs of Dina Stevens (Mia Barron), a security officer newly posted to the Dakar embassy. Safety and security officer on paper, anyway; her steely gaze and take-no-prisoners attitude say “spy” pretty much from the get go. 

There are wheels turning behind Barron’s eyes from the first moment of their first encounter; Dina’s a little too interested in the tiny details of Boubs’s accident, and her threats to have him on a plane back to the US the next day seem a bit much for a few bags of wasted cement. Then again, Ali’s Boubs is also having a slightly different conversation in his head than the one he’s having in the room–he’s cagey and self-protective, despite a facade of dumbass kid. Still, he really doesn’t want to go home, so when Dina asks him to complete a tedious and seemingly makework stack of paperwork as the price of retaining his post, he leaps at the chance. And, when he misses one signature on one form–or she leads him to believe that he has–he’s also pretty quick, especially after a couple of beers, to cross a few (more) ethical boundaries to get what he wants. 

We know what Boubs wants, because he has a tendency to overshare, cannily or otherwise–to stay in Dakar; to finish the garden project, even though he can’t take much credit for it; to mend a broken heart; to find his place in the world. It takes a little longer to get a read on  why Dina is spending so much energy resolving what seems to be a penny-ante issue: Is she hitting on Boubs? Does she genuinely find his company pleasant? Is she trying to mentor him? But once we find out that she formerly worked at the Dar es Salaam embassy and missed out on dying in the 1998 bombing only due to a hangover, we start to see how high the stakes are for her: she’s on a personal mission of vengeance for her lost colleagues and friends. Or so we’re meant to believe; Joseph has expertly seeded a foundation for Dina’s half-truths, so we never really can be quite sure what we’re getting. Multiple times, she’ll confess some more-or-less shocking secret, then play it all off as a joke, yet those jokes and other hypotheticals start to coalesce into a subtext more believable than the surface one. 

It’s narratively clever, but also leads to some dead-ends: Once you’ve established that both your characters are good liars who are most of the time playing each other, any actual emotional declaration becomes suspect. Boubs’s professions of feelings for Dina feel sincere, but we also see from the contrast between his younger and older self–or even from the way he acts in a 1999 crisis–that the aw-shucks demeanor is something he can put on and take off. (Ali may be working a little too hard to put a gap between his callow youth and his more jaded current self, which adds to the sense that his naivete is a construct.) Dina’s confessions seem automatically suspect, but we’re meant, I think, to take the dead friends at face value. But does she even have dead friends, let alone a dead lover? Would she really confess all of this to a PCV twenty years younger whom she’s met a handful of times? Would she have had sex with him if he’d been more reluctant to do what she asked of him? How much does he really want to feel useful in the world?

In another moment, the play might work as an abstract interrogation of clashing forms of power and influence: Boubs’s young man of color vs Dina’s middle-aged white woman; Dina’s institutional authority vs Boubs’s boots-on-the-ground experience in Dakar; Boubs insisting that affection and manipulation are contradictory and Dina believing they go hand in hand; Boubs’s self-interest expressed as altruism and Dina’s as vengeance. But in March 2025, all I can think is that the Peace Corps is probably on the chopping block, and if Y2K happened again, Elon Musk would be figuring out how to monetize it.