While Philip Glass’s works are now performed in grand halls, his latest New York premiere is playing in a 99-seat theater in the East Village. But if “Drowning,” scored for just three singers, one keyboard and one harp, is smaller in scale than “Akhnaten” or a symphony, it is no minor event.

JoAnne Akalaitis, one of Mr. Glass’s earliest and most important collaborators, has directed “Drowning,” a half-hour “pocket” opera setting of a short, surreal play by the Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, a fixture of experimental theater who died in 2018.

In the 1970s, Ms. Akalaitis and Mr. Glass were among the partners in the theater collective Mabou Mines. They were also married at the time, and their artistic collaboration has long outlived their marriage. As has Mabou Mines: In the company’s staging of “Drowning,” which runs through March 7 on a double bill with a staged reading of Fornés’s “Mud,” Ms. Akalaitis proves that she still knows how to get the most out of Mr. Glass’s easily recognizable style. While some directors can be hypnotized by his churning, repetitive structures, providing stage pictures and character movements that progress as though on autopilot, Ms. Akalaitis finds moments to let subtle characterization come through.

Pea and Roe, the leads in Fornés’s enigmatic play, sit at a cafe table and ponder images they see in a newspaper: a beautiful woman; on another page, a snowman. Fornés describes these two characters’ eyes as “reddish and watery,” their necks and faces as festooned with warts. Ms. Akalaitis’s production, with makeup by Gabrielle Vincent, exaggerates the physical decline a bit, with the warts looking more like open sores.