You’d have to have a really good memory to recall dining in Rye and having Martin Dockery as your waiter.

“I was so bad at waitering,” he recalls with a laugh. “I was never fired. Fired makes it sound dramatic, like there was a showdown. But so many places, the writing would be on the wall when my hours would just get cut down and there’d be someone new who’d I’d have to train and then, all of a sudden, I wouldn’t be on the schedule.”

At least he took it well.

“I wouldn’t argue. I wasn’t mad,” says the 39-year-old playwright and storyteller, who comes to Pleasantville’s Rosenthal JCC Theatre on Saturday with a one-man show called “Wanderlust,” about his travels from temp worker to West Africa in search of an epiphany.

Dockery has temped for nearly a dozen years, starting at the New York Stock Exchange, a job he chronicles in “Wanderlust.”

He worked there for several years – after his Rye waitering career ended – and made enough money to travel.

Then the serial backpacker returned to another temporary job, made enough money to travel again, and repeated the process.

The temping, which seemed like a good thing to do “in anticipation of other work” was a means, but to what end, he began to wonder.

“It’s a prologue to what you’re really going to be doing, but I’ve spent more than a decade in this prologue phase,” says Dockery, who is currently temping in the education department at the Museum of Modern Art.

“This isn’t my real job. It’s just something I’m doing in anticipation of what I’ll eventually be doing. But after a certain amount of time, you have to wonder if the anticipatory job is, in fact, your real job.”

That’s why he picked up and went to West Africa, landing in Senegal in 2004 with no plans between the day he landed and his return ticket five months later. His travels took him to 11 countries in that span.

“I had no idea where I was going to go or what I was going to do,” he says. “I didn’t know anybody.”

What he had was “this romantic idea that if you put yourself in some extreme location, like a great set, a great story should unfold. Lots of people before me have gone off to the desert and staggered around and had revelations and visions. I guess I fancied that if I staggered around a bit in this similar setting, that would happen to me.”

And that’s what Saturday’s show is about.

The problem he soon encountered was that nearly everyone in Africa spoke French, a language Dockery knew not at all.

“My ability to speak fluently to people was very encumbered,” he says.

Still, he kept a detailed journal of what he did, who he met and what they talked about, gathering stories from Africans and fellow travelers.

Performing “Wanderlust” is a different experience every time, Dockery says.

“I know what I’m going to say, but it’s not written down word for word,” he says. “It’s roughly the same each night, but I work off a mental outline. I’ve told it to myself several times and to Jean-Michele Gregory, the woman who’s directing it.”

But it’s not improvised, says Dockery.

“Extemporaneous is the best word, and it’s got a lot of syllables,” he says dryly. “It sounds good. I’m an anticipatory employee who does extemporaneous monologues. If I could just figure out how to put that onto a resume.”

Gregory encouraged Dockery – a Rye Country Day School graduate who won the Paul Newman acting award while getting his English degree at Kenyon College – to craft his experiences and journals into a piece of theater.

“The show is about the connections you make, even when you don’t speak the language,” he says.

“When you travel like this, even though you’re going there hoping for the big Hope Diamond moment – the epiphany in the sky – along the way you are having moments that are real and meaningful but that sneak up on you that are smaller but are as profound once you stop to recognize them,” Dockery says.

“The show is those moments strung together like some kind of necklace.”