Ishmael Reed in Person There are two genuine American creations: the blues, and the soap opera. Personal Problems, conceived by Oakland-based writer Ishmael Reed, is a black soap opera unfolding in the melancholy of a blue note. Enlisting legendary Bill Gunn (Ganga & Hess) as director, Reed and producer Walter Cotton sketched out an improvisatory scenario exploring the moody tribulations of a group of Harlem residents. Exhausted by big city life, Johnnie (Verta Mae Grosvenor), a nurse from South Carolina, is the heart and hearth of the affair. Around her spin her husband Charles (Walter Cotton), a transit worker; Father Brown (Jim Wright), and a circle of friends and neighbors. The Browns are unsentimental in their dealings with economic dead-ends, freeloading relatives, and capricious love. Director Gunn plays it on the outside with the cast, allowing scenes to find their own syncopations-very different from the edited affluence of Days of Our Lives. Reed's down-to-earth drama is not an anti-soap; rather, it's a naturalistic expansion of the form, adding ethnicity to the language of the everyday. And, like the blues, Personal Problems sings of the survivors. --Steve Seid