Had it with the old “hooker with a heart of gold” cliché? Make way for the “gigolo with a heart of gold and a girlfriend and some sexual confusion after meeting a tousle-haired blond client” cliché.

This new genre, while just as limiting as the old “Nights of Cabiria”/”Leaving Las Vegas” iteration, has recently taken root off-Broadway. First came “The Little Dog Laughed,” and now there’s the weightier yet less fulfilling “All That I Will Ever Be,” the latest adventure in well-phrased self-involvement from “Six Feet Under” creator Alan Ball. Notwithstanding a few perceptive ideas about the impermeability of certain beliefs amid dissolving racial and sexual boundaries, Mr. Ball and director Jo Bonney have created a series of trite confrontations that culminate with a bit of rough trade depicted as a path to self-acceptance. If you ever wondered how “Pretty Woman” might have looked in Jean Genet’s hands, here’s your chance to find out.

Omar (Peter Macdissi), the rent boy in question, has the sort of vaguely Mediterranean complexion and gentle, less-than-fixed accent that serves as a sort of racial/ethnic/sexual blank slate. In interactions with Angelenos of all stripes, he identifies himself as both gay and bisexual, not to mention Saudi, Greek, Algerian, and a half dozen other nationalities.

When he finally gets down to business, his client — a brooding rich late-20-something named Dwight (Austin Lysy) — calls him “Osama” and worse. During sex. Not your usual meet-cute scenario, but a romance soon blossoms between Omar and Dwight, albeit a fraught one filled with factually suspect intimacies and constantly filtered through the ambiguous prism of Omar’s exoticism:

DWIGHT: Can you imagine what it must be like, to live without people you don’t even know hating you because of what you are?

OMAR: No. No, I cannot imagine that.

DWIGHT: I can. That’s the problem.

In explaining his new relationship to some friends, Dwight asks, “When was the last time you knew someone wasn’t ridiculously self-aware and dryly referential and darkly cynical?” Judging from the hyperverbal train wrecks once again on display here, the question could as easily be posed to Mr. Ball. Dwight is a slightly less motivated version of Nate Fisher, the prodigal slacker from “Six Feet Under,” taking out his issues with his dead parent on his living one. (This time the recipient is the father, played with the right blend of concern and smarm by Victor Slezak.)

Much of the play’s discursive dysfunction could be lifted directly from that show or from Mr. Ball’s “American Beauty” script: “I don’t want to have kids, I don’t want to produce any more babies for the matrix, and dress ’em up in Baby Gap and take digital pictures of them, and e-mail them to every single person I’ve met in my entire life.” To be fair, Mr. Lysy soldiers through this and several other similar mouthfuls with as much honesty as can be expected.

Omar is less familiar, and his inscrutable-foreigner persona is a source of both titillation and cultural commentary. (Nearly every character discusses a megabudget action movie called “Destroyers of Eden,” in which a Middle Eastern man serves as the beautiful exotic foil to Colin Farrell’s hero, with the exception of an older man who waxes nostalgic about the Edenic splendor of Beirut in its pre-civil war, exuberantly homoerotic days.) Mr. Ball’s thesis is that people spend so much time trying to figure out who Omar really is in order to avoid asking themselves the same question. But the play’s desire for emotional honesty is at cross purposes with its overreliance on navel-gazing verbosity. “Sometimes when you talk, it’s like you’re just farting words,” Omar tells the frequently stoned Dwight after a particularly unfocused disquisition, and many characters in “All That I Will Ever Be” suffer from a similar malady.

Ms. Bonney has become the goto director for youthful ensemble casts (‘subUrbia,” “A Soldier’s Play,” “Stop Kiss”), so it’s easy to forget how good she is with older actors. She showed it with Edwin Lee Gibson’s Oedipus in “The Seven,” and she shows it here with Mr. Slezak and with David Margulies, who adds a new dimension of warmth and complexity to the play as a client of Omar’s with relatively few illusions.

She has a much harder time reining in Mr. Ball’s emotional and logistical sprawl. The long arcs and gradual character development on “Six Feet Under” have done no favors to his sense of pacing: Scenes spin their wheels for minutes at a time, potentially crucial information about a past love affair is mentioned and then quickly forgotten, and the central relationship builds so fitfully that the Act II fireworks feel unwarranted. (These later scenes also expose the shortcomings of Mr. Macdissi, a charming actor whose more “honest” moments rarely convince.)

And despite the efforts of the versatile designers Neil Patel (sets) and David Lander (lighting), Ms. Bonney fights a losing battle maintaining a workable pace with a set of locations more common to television than to theater — 12 scenes in 11 different places all over Los Angeles. (Even when the action returns to Dwight’s apartment, it’s usually a different room.)

By the time “All That I Want to Be” sputters to its close, Mr. Macdissi has been thrust into the unplayable role of a tough-love-offering sex therapist who offers insight through headlocks. “It’s not your money I’m interested in,” he barks at a new john. “It’s you. Who are you, Mike?” Perhaps it’s time to introduce the “volunteer hooker with a psychology degree and a black belt” cliché. Or perhaps not.

Until March 11 (79 E. 4th St., between Second Avenue and Bowery, 212-239-6200).