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Dakar 2000 Is a Tense and Unstable Thriller
It falls short of wild combustible invention but also stops shy of absolute historical fidelity.
The play is a thriller about a Peace Corps volunteer caught up in a State Department official’s schemes in Senegal, an anxiety piece about people facing what they think will be the Y2K apocalypse, an exaggerated memoir that comes with lived-in detail, and a meditation on American interventionism abroad that strains to wink at current events. That sort of metafictional premise can drag a play into sophistry really fast, and it’s a recurring fascination for Joseph, who tends to lacquer his historical dramas with prose-poetic musings that veer into magical realism (successfully, in Describe the Night and his big breakout, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, or blurrily, in Guards at the Taj). Abubakr Ali, who was such a great antagonizing presence in Toros, leans on Boubs’s puffed-up charisma, playing a guy who talks a big game — he does a twiddling motion with his fingers as he describes an adventure that’s like a sommelier emphasizing a wine’s terroir— but is clearly terrible at follow-through.
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