At Long Last : Two decades after he wrote it, playwright Martin Perrini will see ‘Martin’s Place’ on the stage.

A message for all those playwrights out there with unproduced scripts:

Hang in there. You never know.

A good example is “Martin’s Place,” a drama opening tonight at American Renegade Theatre. Playwright Martin Perrini, who’s finally seeing his work on stage 20 years after writing it, can vouch for the validity of not giving up.

Born in southern Michigan, Perrini moved to New York in the 1960s with theater dreams dancing in his head and began a five-year stretch of studying with acting guru Lee Strasberg. The actors in the Strasberg workshop kept repeating the same scenes over and over, so Perrini decided to write some himself.

His scenes and characters, all drawn from his youth, included one about three men waiting for a train. Strasberg, Perrini says, liked the scene and advised him to write more about these people.

That was the genesis of “Martin’s Place,” the characters, the train--which figures prominently in the drama--and the locale.

“Then, about five years later,” Perrini says, “I took Strasberg’s encouragement and started to write it. I wrote the whole play in about two months. Then there was a period of trying to get the play done.”

As any playwright knows, the anxiety about production can be horrendous. The wait seemed to be over 15 years ago, after Perrini submitted “Martin’s Place” to an international playwriting competition held by Theatre East, a group still going strong in Studio City. The competition was narrowed to two plays, Perrini’s drama and a comedy.

Perrini recalls, “The husband of the woman who put up the money for the competition had died of cancer, and she thought the comedy would be more suited to the memory of her husband. So I didn’t get a production then. Perhaps it was best in the long run.”

Into the trunk went the script. Until recently. Acting coach Bob Monroe, who had been in the Strasberg workshop with Perrini, frequently used scenes from the play in his classes and had never forgotten the script. Through Monroe, American Renegade’s artistic director David Cox discovered the play. Just over two months ago, Cox called Perrini in New York for production rights, and the waiting was over.

The play is set in a bar called Martin’s Place in a small southern Michigan town on Charlie Navarre’s 50th birthday, an occasion his friends at the bar won’t let him forget it. But for Charlie it’s a time for taking the measure of his life.

Charlie’s at a point where he can’t cope, Perrini says. “He tries to go back in his memories to find a safe place. My feeling is that Charlie is all of us. He’s in a flight from emptiness. He’s hit the wall. The play flows through Charlie. . . . Life is closing in on him.”

In “Martin’s Place,” Charlie talks about the Mercury, a train that passes through but never stops in town. For Charlie, the train is a symbol for his life--it goes a hundred miles an hour, and it’s quickly gone. “If you could catch that rush of speed, you could change your life,” he says.

Elkanah J. Burns, who plays Charlie, says the complexity and depth of the character are “a tremendous gift” for an actor.

“Charlie is like the rest of us,” Burns says. “He was born with a great rush of enthusiasm. He had all kinds of great ideas about life. All of a sudden he’s 50 years old, and he looks back and wonders what happened.”

Burns says that he knows a number of people, many of them great successes, who never lived up to that rush of optimism they had in their teens or early 20s.

“Charlie’s just had a lot of things pile up on him,” Burns says. “He has never had the courage, or whatever it took, to break loose from this flatland.”

Fifty, Burns says, seems to be a watershed year for many people. “Charlie has a line, ‘I used to have dreams. I can’t remember when they stopped.’ ”

Perrini adds, “All of the characters are trapped in one way or another, but they either don’t know it, or they don’t care. But Charlie is facing that kind of reality.”

Perrini’s reality is something else. Although for a number of years he has been coordinator of visitor service at Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum, he has never stopped writing since those scenes in Strasberg’s workshop. He is currently working on his second full-length drama. That’s a playwright’s reality.

* T. H. McCulloh writes regularly about theater for The Times.

WHERE AND WHEN

What: “Martin’s Place.”

Location: American Renegade Theatre, 11305 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood.

Hours: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday. Ends Feb. 19.

Price: $12 to $15.

Call: (818) 763-4430.