Rajiv Joseph’s 2025 play Dakar 2000 uses the outer form of a thriller to explore deception itself. The Vermont Stage production nails the tension in Joseph’s tangle of motives and meaning, but a play designed to make viewers doubt what they see runs a risk. The audience may stay wary when characters routinely trade engrossing personal stories only to end with a laugh at the listener’s gullibility — tricked you. This play demands we administer the same test of trust that the characters do.
At the outset, the main character warns us that what we’re about to see is only almost true. Then his storytelling diverts us with an absorbing tale of his life in espionage. It ends with a startling confession. And then the play springs its trap. “It would be a better story if it did happen, but it didn’t. I’m sorry.” So which is the lie?
The setting is Dakar, Senegal, on the eve of the year 2000. Anxiety about possible computer date malfunctions is worldwide, while in Africa, terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies have put the American government on edge. Enter a Peace Corps volunteer.
Don’t assume it’s playwright Joseph’s own story, even if he was doing that exact work at that exact time. He has called the play partly autobiographical but has also noted that he found the truth restricting. As events grow more dramatic, the story seems increasingly unlikely. He gives us only impossible-to-pin-down characters and a hint that exaggeration could be memory’s version of truth.
The 25-year-old volunteer has just been in an accident and sustained injuries, including a gash to the head worth 17 stitches. He was driving a truck loaded with supplies, and it overturned. Now he has to explain himself. The cool, confident Dina (Chris Caswell) arrives at the Dakar embassy in her natural state of shrewd suspicion. She’s a U.S. government operative who’s seen it all, including the bombing in Tanzania. The volunteer, Boubs (Ian Walls), expects the snigger at his nickname. It’s short for Boubacar and sounds better to the local Senegalese. He’s unnerved when Dina sniffs out what’s fishy about the truck accident.
Her apparently casual questioning soon makes Boubs look as if he’s hiding something under his rumpled idealism. And her cynical composure could mask a bureaucrat or a mastermind. The intensity starts climbing even before we know what each might be after. And soon they inch toward seduction of the most primal sort: telling stories to gain trust.
Dina’s interrogation traps Boubs in a corner; he wiggles, she tightens her grip, and soon he’s facing serious trouble. Or, she notes, he could do her a favor. That easy transition is the first of many that twine the characters together, but, alas, it is the only one animated by naked need.
For the rest of the play, what they want from each other hides behind how they might get it — through flirtation, exploitation or the moral rationalization of all espionage: The end justifies the means. Desire flickers within curiosity. Whether the sexual tension is real or not soon makes no difference. As Y2K approaches, the scene shifts from the embassy to more intimate locations, but the story is about living on lies, not reaching the truth.
A full corkscrew of plot twists makes the 90-minute running time engrossing. Joseph uses the possibility of lying to have everything both ways. Is Boubs blind to moral compromise or infatuated with it? He might be a young man looking for a way to make a difference. He might be stealing cement from the State Department. He might be an easy mark for an unnamed spy agency looking for an operative. Perhaps all three?
Is Dina working under orders or freelancing? She might be recruiting him as an agent. She might be exploiting all the asymmetries of their differences in age and power. She might be fighting an attraction to him or giving in to it. Perhaps all three?
The play would like to keep all such possibilities alive, committing to none of them. At last Friday’s performance, I didn’t feel the hush of an audience rapt in a thriller but the museum quiet of people who’d grown distant after watching every arresting disclosure turn out to be a trick.
The script is perhaps too clever for its own good. Much as I wanted to play along, I couldn’t engage with characters invalidating their vulnerability as a gambit. I pulled back.
But this production did much to pull me in. The director and performers give an abstract musing a human touch without losing all of Joseph’s tricks and turns. Director Virginia Monte maintains a feeling of menace in the lighting and sparse set while keeping the characters buoyant with curiosity about each other. Staging the action on a wide-open runway, with each scene’s props in full view, is a slick reference to theatrical honesty.
Walls and Caswell build the edgy tension that makes seduction feel like a dangerous risk.
Walls and Caswell build the edgy tension that makes seduction feel like a dangerous risk. They do the juggling the script requires to invest every moment with multiple interpretations. Caswell keeps Dina poised between jaded and enthralled. Walls is at his best when the tables turn and Boubs tilts from innocence to arrogance.
The production’s strength is two actors working together and balancing on the heads of all of Joseph’s pins. On a rooftop, with a hint of stars glittering on a moody backdrop, Dina and Boubs convey the wonder of the African sky. They hunt for Jupiter until the depth of the night quiets them. Faced with the size of the universe, they reveal what seem to be truths about themselves. And then the darkest lie emerges, when what could lead to a kiss could also be a betrayal.
Dakar 2000 is a meditation on concealing intentions. “You can’t like someone and manipulate them,” Boubs says with heat. “Yes, you can,” replies the cool Dina. That does indeed prove true. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Trust Me | Theater review: Dakar 2000, Vermont Stage”
This article appears in September 30 • 2026.
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