A new dramatization of Nikolai Gogol's story "The Overcoat," created by director Valery Fokin in collaboration with the composer Alexander Bakshi, gives us reason to step back and gain perspective on one of Moscow's most inventive and fruitful creative teams of the last decade.

 Fokin and Bakshi first joined forces 14 years ago on "A Woman Possessed," an adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Idiot." But their partnership gelled in 1992 on a musical and dramatic project called "The Sidur Mystery," in which the artwork and workshop space of the sculptor Vadim Sidur were brought to life in strange and suggestive ways by musician-actors. In the years and some 15 shows that followed, Fokin and Bakshi have continued exploring the uncharted territory that separates the disciplines of music and dramatic theater. Fokin has cultivated a special interest in the unorthodox use of space, while Bakshi, who over the years has evolved a genre he calls the theater of sound, has at times gone so far as to take over the position of the playwright, using sounds and music in place of words.

The most famous of their joint projects have been "A Hotel Room in the Town of N," a 1994 adaptation of Gogol's novel "Dead Souls," and Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" in 1995. Both shows experimented with minimizing the use of text and maximizing the importance of other communicative elements in connection with the intangible but very real impact of sound.

After the director and composer collaborated on a curiosity -- the 1998 world premiere of the "forgotten" Anton Chekhov one-act play "Tatyana Repina" -- they more or less parted ways. Fokin went on to open the Meyerhold Center on Novoslobodskaya Ulitsa and take over the artistic directorship of the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Bakshi teamed up with director Kama Ginkas and violinist Gidon Kremer to create the stunning musical mystery "The Polyphony of the World" in 2001, and, with the pianist Alexei Lyubimov and puppet and shadow theater director Ilya Epelbaum, he produced the haunting "From the Red Book of Extinction" in 2003.

"The Overcoat," then, mounted jointly by the Sovremennik Theater and the Meyerhold Center, is a reunion of sorts. Not only does it bring Fokin and Bakshi back together, it reunites Fokin with the Sovremennik, the house in which he began his professional career 34 years ago. Moreover, it would appear to be the starting point for a new period of active collaborations. Fokin and Bakshi are already working on multiple projects soon to be performed at the Alexandrinsky.

Gogol's tale about a hyperbolically meek clerk is arguably one of the most influential short stories in all of Russian literature. It has been eulogized, interpreted, imitated and parodied by countless artists of various genres since its publication in 1842. The arguments it generated echo to this day: Did Gogol create a compassionate image of a "little man" who is done in tragically when he resolves to replace his threadbare overcoat with a fancy new one, or did he create a literary joke that sends up sentimentalism in a pungent linguistic stew?

Fokin's production takes the optimal tack; it actually moves in both directions at once. This is a thoughtful, serious work, sometimes even somber, which is broken up from time to time with raucous humor.

One of Fokin's shrewdest moves was to cast Marina Neyolova in the role of the clerk Bashmachkin. Neyolova, the Sovremennik's leading actress, is changed beyond recognition by makeup artist Tatyana Shmykova. Beneath a wig of scraggly hair, hiding behind layers of facial makeup and dwarfed by an oversized clerk's uniform designed by Alexander Borovsky, Neyolova looks twice as small and four times older than she is. It is an amazing transformation made even more effective because she never attempts to "play a man." Her Bashmachkin is an essence, neither male nor female, but something beyond -- a kind of mythical creature representing timidity and conformity. It goes without saying that this odd being must ultimately pay the price for attempting, in a moment of weakness and misguided hubris, to break the rules that control its existence.

In this brief show -- just under an hour in length -- Fokin has almost entirely done away with events. The tiny Bashmachkin emerges from a huge, free-standing overcoat at center stage and runs to work, where he copies documents with his scratchy quill. When he notices a hole in the sleeve of his coat, it falls over like a dead body. He dreams of a beautiful new coat that seduces him as if it were a woman, and when the coat becomes real and is stolen, Bashmachkin is crushed.

But this is not a tale about a coat, a clerk or the callous people he encounters. It is a meditation, or perhaps a nightmare, on the fragility of human life and the temptations that can ravage it. The slightest slip or the silliest desire can obliterate it utterly. The tiny Bashmachkin here emerges as a kind of figure from Greek tragedy, a hero challenged by the gods to be more than he is, failing miserably yet achieving immortality in his failure.

The show begins with the disorienting cinematic vision of swirling white snowflakes projected on a semi-transparent back wall. Bakshi's sounds of muted silence resound in our ears as the blizzard continues, finally adding the howl of wind. Bashmachkin exists in an everchanging sonic space, at times defined by the humming, soaring voices of the Sirin vocal ensemble, whose members traverse a balcony behind the spectators, at times by the sounds Bashmachkin himself makes or encounters -- such as the menacing clatter of a sewing machine when he learns his old coat must be replaced by a new one.

Bashmachkin occasionally utters the text of Gogol's story under his breath, but it isn't so much the words that carry meaning here, as it is the chirping or alarmed or depressed intonation given to them by Neyolova. The story's finale -- Gogol's narrator's suggestion that ghosts and apparitions were involved in the disappearance of Bashmachkin's overcoat -- is delivered by a voice that emanates from behind the spectators in a chant reminiscent of a Russian Orthodox church service.

 Fokin, with designer Borovsky, cut the performance space into various planes. The stage is completely empty but for the two overcoats that move around it and a small step stool that serves as Bashmachkin's workplace. The partition at the back does not hide the deep back corners of space behind it, allowing us glimpses of theater machinery and people moving around and doing their jobs, while panels on the partition itself occasionally open up and slam shut like doors or windows. At times the partition becomes a kind of cinema screen when lively shadow shows staged by Epelbaum are cast upon it by hand-held spotlights manipulated backstage.

Fokin's minimalist direction, Bakshi's understated soundscape and Neyolova's refined performance centered on the tiniest of smiles and minutest of gestures have brought us a jewel of subtlety and finesse.