“Dakar 2000” at Manhattan Theater Club
Glenda Frank in New York City
7 March 2025
The unexpected lurks around every corner in this piece by Rajiv Joseph, a two-hander of seduction and manipulation. Joseph’s Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist with a 2011 Broadway run starring Robin Williams. In this new drama at the Manhattan Theatre Club, Boubs (Abubakr Ali), a goofy Peace Corps volunteer, with no power to bring about change but with the best of intentions, and Dina, a seasoned U.S. Embassy official, both fabricate to amuse and to achieve hidden goals. The playwright himself spent three years in Senegal as a Peace Corps volunteer. Joseph set the play in late December 1999, just before the new century, a time fraught with anxiety and change. Would the computers malfunction because of the three zeros in the date? Was this the apocalypse?
Mia Barron and Abubakr Ali.
Photo credit: Matthew Murphy.
Boubs (short for Boubacar), in his early twenties, loves his assignment, the small village where he is trying to establish a community garden and dig a well. And he is fond of the people who are trying to fulfill their dreams despite many obstacles. We meet him after his truck crash, the heavy bags of cement for the building of the well scattered everywhere. Dina (Mia Barron, Lucille Lortel award for The Coast Starlight), who was transferred to Senegal after her office in Tanzania was bombed and her colleagues killed, has to file the paperwork.
Everything about the accident is suspect. How could he crash on a straight road? Why was the cement ordered to protect his private dwelling enroute to the village? And what about the open bottle they found in the vehicle? Threatened with being sent home, he confesses. He had requested the cement and wire to build a protective wall around his house and to create the village well after his three petitions for supplies had been denied. The woman he planned to propose to had just dumped him and so he took a little liquid comfort and maybe he didn’t really see the cat he swerved to avoid hitting?
So the games begin. There is a way for him to avoid being sent home. He needs to file paperwork for Dina, lots of paperwork with signatures and details, on a two-day deadline. He’s elated. He brings the completed packet to a village café, where Dina discovers one signature is missing on a page he didn’t remember seeing before. He must submit the package now. She hands him a pen and turns her back. He forges the signature and passes test #2.
By the time they spend a night on his roof, drinking beer and gazing at the magnificent African night sky, all the lures are in place. When her car arrives unexpectedly to take her home, she soothes his disappointment by inviting him to share the hotel room she has reserved for New Year’s Eve. The cat-and-mouse game ends with another surprise, and then Boubs, the more sympathetic character, turns the tables, taking a chance to make a difference in this world – by any means possible.
Director May Adrales kept the play crisp and flowing and coordinated the design elements with a sure light hand. I usually don’t mind overacting, even when it’s more “over” than “acting,” but both performers punctuated their lines to the point of amateurism. Ali stayed true to Boubs through the several permutations of his character although he sometimes turned him into a cartoon. Barron’s Dina remained opaque.
The design team was outstanding. The set by Tim Mackabee (2016 Lucille Lortel Award for Joseph’s Guards at the Taj) was unique, highly functional and interpretive. He employed a curved variation of the hanamachi, a raised structure that brought the play to two levels while facilitating a seamless transition between scenes.
Alan C. Edwards, the lighting designer, worked closely with MacKabee as well as acing the transitions from office industrial to Senegal afternoon, to starry night lighting. Bouby’s casual costume changes, designed by Emily Rebholz, were of a kind yet distinctive, eye-catching but unobstructive. There was subtle sound design by Bray Poor. During pre-play we could hear the low street sounds of Dakar. Just the right number of Senegal scenes by Shawn Duan, the projection designer.
