Is there a dark secret in the past of Rajiv Joseph, the playwright best known for his 2009 Iraq war parable Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo and the recent sports-themed dramedy King James (one of the most frequently produced plays of this season)? The hero of his riveting new one-act thriller, Dakar 2000, shares some biographical details with the author — he’s a well-educated American of half-Indian descent who spent several years with the Peace Corps in Senegal toward the tail end of the 20th century. But I somehow doubt that Joseph was recruited as a part-time field agent for the CIA and has pulled off nearly a dozen top-secret assignments over the last quarter century.

That’s the tale that 25-year-old Boubacar, nicknamed Boubs (pronounced “boobs”), shares at the top of the play, which opened Thursday at the Manhattan Theatre Club. The audaciously talented Abubakr Ali plays Boubs with a savvy mix of intelligence, idealism, and sweetness. But there’s also a cunning beneath his laid-back stoner vibes that makes us want to follow the twists and turns of his narrative even as we increasingly question their reliability. It’s an attribute that’s almost immediately recognized by Dina (the wonderful Mia Barron), a 46-year-old CIA operative who’s recently been installed in the U.S. embassy in Dakar, Senegal, and who meets Boubs in the waning days of 1999 when much of the world fears a Y2K calamity.

“You’re a good liar,” she tells him, after calling out the inconsistencies in his account of a car accident that landed him in Dakar’s hospital with 17 stitches. “I don’t begrudge that skill set.” His prevarication extends to the illegal appropriation of cement and other resources sent to beef up the security at his compound following the deadly (and real-life) 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. “A house with a big fence around it makes it MORE of a target,” he protests, while admitting that he redirected the supplies to building a much-needed well and cistern in a nearby village.

Dina and Boubs’s relationship soon becomes a transactional one: He’s allowed to keep the purloined goods if he’ll complete a task for her, collecting signatures and fingerprints of local officials with whom he’s been working. She’s both testing him and recruiting him, for reasons that aren’t immediately clear but that apparently involve the hunt for terrorism suspects linked to those embassy bombings. She also indulges his awkward attempts at flirtation even as she recognizes (1) that she’s way too old for him and (2) that his romantic interest owes more to the recent collapse of a love affair (complete with a dramatically bungled wedding proposal) and his sense of isolation after spending several years overseas with few English-speaking romantic prospects.

Director May Adrales stages this two-hander on Tim Mackabee’s spare turntable set with an authority that manages to override our doubts about the narrative’s questionable plausibility. Could Boubs really be smitten with Dina? Will she really give in to his expectations of a New Year’s Eve hookup? (As if to reinforce the absurdity of their mismatch, Boubs arrives in their hotel room and immediately blurts out, “I brought condoms. I have, like, thirty of them.”) But here, as before, Dina finds a way to deflect Boubs from his personal desires and pivot his focus to her own agenda — in this case, a furtive mission that would not be out of place in a spy thriller, staged with a palpable sense of danger.

For Boubs, the assignment is a revelation. He’s an innate idealist, a do-gooder whose volunteer stint in Africa has been mostly mired in red tape and thwarted ambitions. But through Dina, he’s identified another way that might be able to make a real difference in the world. “You do things,” he tells her. “You live by a code. That’s what I want.” Dakar 2000 is a mesmerizing study about how even the most unlikely people can be seduced to the dark side by being offered a sense of real agency. It’s also about how we respond to those acts of seduction, the corruption that often comes with it, and the self-justifying lies we tell (to ourselves most of all).

Ali and Barron have a convincing chemistry together, a necessary quality to sell a relationship that on paper might seem ridiculous. And Ali continually upends our expectations with slightly unexpected line readings and a confident onstage presence that belies his character’s supposed reticence. He is a good liar, and that’s a useful skill set for an actor or a CIA operative. I have no idea how close Boubs’s experience comes to Joseph’s own time in Senegal — I suspect not close at all — but the power of his storytelling suggests that we will probably never know for sure. And that’s one of the most cunning aspects of Dakar 2000, a drama that’s about the act of storytelling itself and how a crafty liar can string us along with a series of whoppers that he somehow manages to make us swallow without reservation. ★★★★☆

DAKAR 2000
Manhattan Theater Club, Off Broadway
Running time: 90 minutes (no intermission)
Tickets on sale through March 23 (tickets: $79-99)