A middle-aged man — alone, with his back to the audience — sits hunched over his battered desk. Finally, as if to comfort himself, he puts an old record on a turntable. One by one, three women walk past him: a waitress, his mother, a ballerina with wings. Awkwardly, he scurries toward them, one arm outstretched, but he gets there too late. Once again, he’s left alone.

Thus begins the play “Hotel Cassiopeia,” Charles Mee’s strikingly beautiful homage to the outsider artist Joseph Cornell, now having its New York premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Those first heady minutes establish the blueprint for everything that is to come. “Hotel Cassiopeia” is a story — conveyed through images and text fragments — of acute loneliness and longing, transcended by the imagination in brief, rhapsodic bursts.

Cornell, who died in 1972, was famous for the glass-fronted boxes in which he arranged miniature treasures — bird’s eggs, marbles, movie star photos — to draw out the rich and weird associations between them. Mr. Mee and his longtime collaborators, director Anne Bogart and SITI Company, are equally ardent practitioners of the art of collage, and they take a similarly indirect, associative route to Cornell.

Mr. Mee’s script incorporates passages from Cornell’s diaries and letters, clips from the artist’s favorite movies, fragments of biography, interludes of song and dance, excerpts from Colette’s writings, and scraps of text found on the Internet. For her part, Ms. Bogart arranges and rearranges the characters, props, and set elements on the stage as if it were a magnified version of a Cornell box in progress. A tree, a ballet barre, and a plastic globe are levitated and then returned to earth. A bicycle sails by. A trio of yammering men discusses everything from herbs to girls. Chocolate cake is served. Long clips from films are projected onto the star chart, with onstage characters chiming in on the movie actors’ lines.

Yet despite — or perhaps because of — the flurry of words and activities onstage, a picture of striking clarity emerges. People in Cornell’s life (family members, a local waitress, a smattering of famous friends) and out-of-reach people (Lauren Bacall) come and go, but the endearingly shy man in the suit remains onstage, often hovering near his desk. Gradually, Mr. Mee and Ms. Bogart effect a stunning transformation: The moonlit landscape, dominated by a giant star chart, comes to stand for the terrain of Cornell’s imagination and emotional life.

With his bright eyes and brisk, efficient motions, the character identified as Joseph (Barry O’Hanlon, in a performance of great range and subtlety) is a kind of Thornton Wilder character — a chipper small-town fellow concealing yearning and dread just beneath the surface. One minute, he chatters away about his love of sweets; the next, he describes harrowing battles with depression. He pleads with his mother to stop being so severe, and he describes his beloved objects to his disabled brother, whom he tenderly cares for every evening. He alludes to his sexless life (Cornell is presumed to have died a virgin) and invests his romantic energy in crushes on actresses and ballerinas.

Like Mr. Mee’s script, Ms. Bogart’s handsome production adopts the technique of assemblage without losing sight of the human being who loved those seashells and scraps of string. Mixed in among Joseph’s collectibles are a Christmas card from a colleague he scarcely knew and a box of matches he imagines to be Lauren Bacall’s. These tokens of affection — insubstantial as they are — mean the world to a man starved for human contact, yet unable to broach it.

As Cornell’s boxes do, “Hotel Cassiopeia” deals in small treasures: an arrangement of teacups on a tall ladder, a small and perfect poem, a flutter of confetti, an airborne stream of bubbles, a horse figurine mounted on a plate, the luminous celluloid face of Hedy Lamarr, or a husky-voiced chanteuse singing “What Is This Thing Called Love?” If these little tokens testify to the lonely obsessions of a reclusive man, they also speak to a universal need to — in the phrase of one character — “relish life itself.” Grafting Mr. Mee’s talents and Ms. Bogart’s stagecraft onto Cornell’s life and art has produced a deeply resonant work, steeped in the kinds of yearnings and associations Cornell held so dear.

Through October 12 (BAM Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton St., Fort Greene, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).