Mia Barron and Abubakr Ali Photo by Matthew Murphy

Boubs warns us from the outset that what we are about to see is true, or somewhat true, or not quite true. He's speaking from 2024 Budapest but harkens quickly back to the titular time (actually 1999) and place, where he's a lost soul, a twentysomething mixed-race American Peace Corps volunteer. His attempts to help a women's group in the Senegalese hamlet of Thiadiye build a community garden have landed him in a remote hospital, after turning his truck over while delivering not-quite-authorized supplies to them. From there he proceeds to the U.S. Embassy in Dakar, where he encounters Dina (Mia Barron), the attractive State Department employee some 25 years his senior.

They're about to enter a complicated cat-and-mouse game, rendered by Joseph with a surfeit of exposition. Y2K is about to happen, and it may cause the end of the world, or so the thinking went at the time. She's questioning him about the accident, knowing more about it than she lets on, and slyly indoctrinating him into a plan of her own, an epic revenge scenario to get the instigator of the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. She worked in the latter office, skipped work that day due to a hangover, and lost her dearest colleagues, including one she was having an affair with.

This is one of those plays where spoilers abound, but suffice it to say that Dina will turn on the cougar charm to manipulate Boubs, and Boubs, recovering from an aborted marriage proposal to his estranged girlfriend, will respond. Tim Mackabee's clever set, dominated by a curved runway, will revolve to depict Boubs's roof. There, in a well-written scene–though Dina, who has had six beers and says she can't hold her liquor, seems to be holding it just fine–the two will cautiously flirt their way closer. Dina will ask, "Do you ever wonder if it's all a big lie? The cosmos. Existence. Our general consciousness. Maybe it's all a simulated event within a much larger framework that we can't fathom." Intriguing speculation, and then Joseph just drops it. As in his previous two-hander at Manhattan Theatre Club, King James, he likes elliptical dialogue, and he sure piles on the extraneous back-and-forth here.

He's setting up an action scene, one lit so dimly by Alan C. Edwards that we can't tell whether the unbilled third character is the stage manager or Barron in an overcoat; and then another well-written scene where Boubs and Dina, assessing the aftermath, will spin out a couple of scenarios about what happened, and we're not sure which to believe. It's more of Joseph's infuriating nonspecificity, which bumps up against some pithier, better-wrought observations. "You can't like someone and manipulate them," Boubs protests when he finds out something Dina was priming him for, and she replies, "Yes, you can. Sorry, but you can, and I did."

It's a perplexing character dynamic. Boubs, for all his occasionally smart and occasionally idiotic observations, is a pretty ordinary young man. And Ali doesn't bring a lot of distinction to him, not that it's clear how he could. Boubs is young, he's horny, he's unfocused–how interesting is he going to be? "The dumb, boring truth," he tells us from the start, "is that this is mostly the story of a kid who just wanted to make a difference." A dumb, boring truth indeed, and we've seen more compelling stories about kids who wanted to make differences. As Dina, Barron has rather more to work with, more character history and motivation, and she negotiates them nimbly. Watch her near the end, where she senses Boubs is blackmailing her, and how she reacts with a mixture of outrage and pride, having molded him into the operator he's learning to be. Nicely rendered, and Max Adrales's direction knows where to place the emphasis.

But what is Dakar 2000 ultimately saying? It's the intricate dance of two unevenly weighted protagonists, a 25-year journey where nothing really changes, and we never do find out what becomes of one of them. They consistently lie to each other, which gets tired fast. One hopes Joseph will have something profound to impart, something about the moral ambiguities of foreign relations, the unintended consequences of personal vendettas, the hazards of intergenerational relationships. If any of that's here, I missed it.