I grew up in the suburb of Whitefish Bay and lived in this lily white world throughout high school.

The only black people I ever saw were housekeepers and a rare athlete on one of the teams we played against.

That isolation lasted until I was welcomed to Bronzeville in the summer between my junior and senior years. I got a job at Gimbels Schusters, the big department store on 3rd Street. I worked in the department that sold tires and auto supplies, and the offices were just across Garfield Street, to the north of the big store.

My job was to sell tires and to operate the machine that balanced the wheels that had new tires on them. Duke Essich, a middle-aged black man, ran the department. Willie Johnson ran the installation department, and he was as amused at this white kid working for him as the white kid was perplexed by this black man who chewed toothpicks, sipped from a flask and lounged on a pile of used tires when there was no work to perform.

Gimbels Schusters was one of the anchor stores in Bronzeville, an area bounded by 3rd Street on the east and 12th Street on the west, North Avenue on the north and Juneau on the south. The area was full of black businesses and homes and shops and families where men worked for Allis Chalmers or A. O. Smith, women ran the house and kids played outside.

It’s against this backdrop that made me so eagerly anticipate "Welcome to Bronzeville," the world premiere of the Sheri Williams Pannell play that opened Friday night at First Stage. Pannell has an artistic history in Milwaukee that is regal, and I expected this play to tap into the vibrancy of that neighborhood that eventually disappeared in a torrent of freeway construction, job losses and the growth of dysfunctional family lives.

Instead of getting a play that celebrated the richness and power of a neighborhood, Pannell has delivered a sermon that seems more appropriate to a Sunday morning church kindergarten class than a living and breathing slice of life, complete with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts rather than real live people.

Bronzeville was alive with great music, both local and touring, and featured "black and tan clubs" where white and black people mingled despite the segregation everywhere else in the city. It was a safe place where kids roamed the streets, the cops were looking to help, families looked out for each other, opportunity was the order of the day and the night rollicked to the beat of the blues and the thump of good jazz. I’ll never forget Willie Johnson dragging me to a club called "The Mint" after work. I had my first taste of beer, my first exposure to live jazz and the first time I ever smelled marijuana.

Pannell has focused her play on a group of kids who are trying to work up a singing act to participate in the local talent show. There are the usual conflicts with one parent who is skeptical and another who is permissive. There are kids who get in trouble and kids who are afraid of trouble. There’s a good-hearted cop. And singer Billie Holiday makes an appearance.

The story is predictable, and the characters so one dimensional that it’s hard to develop any emotional connection with any of them. Bronzeville was a place of immense humanity, but it has been sanitized here into something that doesn't seem genuine.

Part of the difficulty is that the dialogue doesn’t sound like the way people talk, either now or 50 years ago. It’s almost as if Pannell wanted to get reaction from the mention of familiar Milwaukee landmarks. Twice in the early going a kid talks about going to the pool or the park, but each time the kid says "Lapham Park." If it’s your neighborhood park and pool nobody talks that way. The kid says, "I’m going to the park."

Way too much of this play is devoted to one gimmick after another trying to preach the sermon that it was in those days that "it takes a village" was born because in Bronzeville, the whole village did, indeed, cooperate to raise these children.

Pannell delivered sermons about stealing and honesty and being true to yourself and behaving like an adult and be willing to tell people that you love them and be brave and obey your parents and wear clean clothes and work for what you get. All those good things that are the hallmark of Sunday sermons.

It’s also difficult to register the obvious longing for that happier time. Merle Haggard sang a song called "Are the Good Times Really Over for Good" and this play is the dramatic version of that song. The answer in the song is yes, and that’s the answer that should be in this play.

I have great respect for Pannell and her body of work, and I’m slightly conflicted as to why this play seemed so far out of the normally powerful First Stage production reputation.

The subject of the story is a good one, and there are stories to be told. But I think the main problem is that Pannell wrote the play, wrote the lyrics and directed the play. I have always maintained that a playwright should never direct their own play. The production needs another set of eyes, digging deep to find the truths that need to be told.

Another director could have helped to pull the kind of stuff out of the actors that this production so desperately needs. The standards at First Stage are high, and it takes a lot of work to reach them.  It's almost as if this is a class play instead of a full-on production by one of the best companies in Milwaukee. 

Without that extra set of eyes, Pannell has only given us truths that are obvious ones and the brilliant subtleties of the real Bronzeville are missing from start to finish.

"Welcome to Bronzeville" runs through Feb. 5 and information on showtimes and tickets is available here.