And for his next trick, monologuist Josh Lefkowitz will riff for 85 minutes on how hard it is to be a 26-year-old artist struggling to write a follow-up to his celebrated show from the 2006 Capital Fringe Festival, lest he be forced to, well, get a job. Also, he loves his girlfriend, but once he became a success — Heaven forfend! — other attractive women started hitting on him.

Yep, it sure sounds like the longest 85 minutes of your life.

It’s not. Actually, the show is over in a veritable blink. He’s really got it, this fey David Byrne look-alike, and by “it” we mean a relaxed and commanding stage presence, an insightful comedic sensibility that’s just different enough from those of the late Spalding Gray or the great Henry Rollins to keep us awake, and a sincere appreciation for just how insanely lucky he is to talk about himself for a living.

There’s more to it than that, of course. Like all great autobiographers and raconteurs, Lefkowitz seems just a little more sentient than most of us. So when he talks about walking into a bookstore and feeling taunted by the likes of William Faulkner, Herman Melville, and James Baldwin, it’s actually funny rather than self-aggrandizing. Lefkowitz’s simultaneous fear of running out of things to say and his urgent desire for a break from the metronome of real-time autobiography (“it’s like you’re not really living your life”) will feel distinctly familiar to anyone with a creative molecule in them. And who doesn’t secretly or not-so-secretly suspect that theirs is a story worth telling?

Yakety yakety yak: Josh Lefkowitz tries to figure it all out in Now What?

Lefkowitz also addresses the question all young storytellers wrestle with: that of whether to introduce more chaos into their own life simply to have something interesting to write about. If his isn’t the most insightful take on this perennial dilemma, it's at least sympathetic and humane.

Of course, if Lefkowitz really is as ambitious as he says, he’ll get out of his own head for a while now. He’s so at ease and empathetic he’d probably do well to seek work as an actor for a few years before he makes another attempt to rewrite Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey into Night, one of the many creative false-starts he recounts here. What Next? feels like a holding pattern; a chance for an exciting young performer to buy himself some time while he figures out what to do with his fast-ripening talent. For now, though, he’s somehow managed to spin his belly button lint into silk. Neat trick, that one.

Now What? is at Woolly Mammoth's rehearsal hall through Nov. 25th. Tickets are available here.