“Personal Problems” contains not a single shot that can be called beautiful, but there’s also not a genuinely wrong-footed view in the whole work. It’s as if the camera is negotiating with reality, trying to find a place at the characters’ tables. The viewer gets a wide window into African-American life in New York at this time; it’s intimate to the point of awkwardness. The title derives from what Ms. Brown, who works as a nurse (and is brought to spectacular, unaffected life by Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, the groundbreaking culinary anthropologist and writer) says in an onscreen interview at the opening of the work. Reflecting on her place in the city relative to South Carolina, from where she came, and how she related to a patient who came in with a bullet wound who was also from that state, she goes on: “Of course everybody’s got their own personal problems so you go home, you got the problems of home … I’m tense, a lot of the time.” The tensions are such that anyone can understand them, but this work is also about how the added dimension of being black in America increases stress.