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Four decades after his star turn as an alcoholic alien in the film “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” David Bowie is now co-writing a new stage work based on the same story.

Off Broadway’s New York Theater Workshop said on Thursday that Mr. Bowie would collaborate with Enda Walsh, the Irish playwright who won a Tony Award for “Once,” in writing the new piece, entitled “Lazarus.” The play will feature new songs by Mr. Bowie, as well as new arrangements of older songs, and will focus on the story of Thomas Newton, the alien-turned-inventor portrayed by Mr. Bowie in the 1976 film.

Mr. Bowie won’t be on stage, nor will this be his first theatrical venture — in the early 1980s, he spent three months playing the title role in “The Elephant Man” on Broadway.

“Lazarus” will be directed by Ivo van Hove, an avant-garde Belgian director who has a long relationship with New York Theater Workshop and used Mr. Bowie’s music in a Dutch-language production of “ Angels in America” that ran last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

James C. Nicola, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop, said he was not sure how to describe the project — whether even to call it a musical — and said it been in secret development for some years.

He said Mr. Bowie, who declined to comment, had been seeking to do a theatrical work inspired by Walter Tevis’s 1963 novel “The Man Who Fell to Earth,” and brought the idea to Mr. van Hove, who in turn brought the project to Mr. Walsh and to the New York theater.

“It’s going to be a play with characters and songs — I’m calling it music theater, but I don’t really know what it’s going to be like, I just have incredible trust in their creative vision,” Mr. Nicola said. “I’m really excited about it. These are three very different sensibilities to be colliding.”

Mr. Nicola said that the show, which is scheduled to open late this year, would not retell the story of the book and film, but would feature some of the same characters.

The theater’s 2015-16 season will also include another world premiere, a play called “Fondly, Collette Richland,” featuring Elevator Repair Service, a company best-known for “Gatz” and other stagings of texts from early 20th century American literature. The company will collaborate with the playwright Sibyl Kempson on the work, which Mr. Nicola described as “strangely, phantasmagorically, beautiful and eerie.”