Dakar 2000 – 23 February 2025

What does it mean to do good in the world? What does it mean to make a difference in the world? Dakar 2000 explores the idea that having an impactful life doesn’t always correlate with living a good life. The protagonist, Boubs (Abubakr Ali) and his foil, Dina (Mia Barron), cross paths and inadvertently both corrupt and cleanse each other in a constantly shifting definition of morality and connection. In the end, Dakar 2000 leaves the impression that not all desired connection leads somewhere good, and that if a person’s ultimate trust derives from their feelings they may be on a path to exploitation, not enlightenment. The interesting sticking point is that even mutual exploitation can be inherently unequal.

Boubs and Dina’s initial spark of connection is built on teaching each other to lie. Dina tells Boubs he’s a good liar and sincerely means it as a compliment. In his mind though, lying bears more resemblance to storytelling and less resemblance to manipulation. Though the quasi romantic journey to his rooftop gets him interested in manipulation, his attempts are toward getting Dina to like him, while she is sizing him up for a job for which she needs someone disposable. After seeing how the play ends, her questions about his life seem carefully crafted around who would miss him and less towards a genuine interest in his life. Yet he is beginning to learn to manipulate her, and is taking advantage of her drunkenness to get close to her through his very genuine attempts to learn about her past. Later, when their Y2K new years’ rendezvous actually happens, both of their manipulations have worked. She gets him to do her dirty work but he’s gotten her to like him too much to dispose of him. In the end, she asks him to say no to an offer and he says yes out of a desire to continue a connection that doesn’t exist in any pure sense of what it means to care for someone. Did she tell him to say no because she wanted him to say yes? Was his defiant yes really him choosing his own personal usefulness and agency or was it another layer of Dina’s plan? Not only does the audience not know, 25 years later (as spoken by Boubs’s opening narration) Boubs himself does not know.

The philosophical components of Rajiv Joseph’s writing were earth shattering, particularly the questions about the right to take a life— your own, another’s, protecting someone, revenge, last resort, gut reaction… but there were definitions of taking a life here that weren’t death. Dina effectively took Boubs’s life in the sense that she took him from a Peace Corp volunteering at a women’s community garden in Senegal to a dangerous undercover field agent working jobs with questionable morality serving a greater power that he does not really know as a way of trying to find a path back to her. Yet he also takes her life. Boubs shows Dina an existence she has denied herself except for in this brief moment— simplicity, solitude, escaping to a different part of the world, being seen, overcoming loss, looking at the world through fresh eyes— even though she turns her back on him it’s clear in those desperate moments where she urges him to leave that she has recognized the darker side of what she does and knows she can’t go back to ignoring it.

The design elements, particularly lighting (Alan C. Edwards), scenic (Tim Mackabee), sound (Bray Poor) and projections (Shawn Duan) come together to show us a world that is spinning out of control faster than the characters can imagine yet is also frightfully still at moments when there is nowhere to go. The elevated part of the set was used not just as a rooftop or beautiful aesthetic, but also as a way to show power dynamics between characters who were constantly trying to one up each other without truly knowing where they stood. Taken as a whole Dakar 2000 does a timely and impactful job of sparking more questions than it answers. While the moments in the play may or may not have occurred in some form or fashion, similar moments run rampant in today’s world. The real question I found in Dakar 2000 was about if and when it is okay to look away.

I attended this performance on a press pass from The Press Room.