'Bethany' review: America Ferrera troubled

Ferrera plays Crystal, a single mother who lost her sales job and her house by foreclosure. Then children's services took away her daughter while she re-established herself. Without losing her resilient, aimed-to-please smile and business-chick suit, Crystal gets a job selling Saturns and breaks into one of the thousands of foreclosed houses in a 2009 subdivision. As this country's promises collapse around her, she reconciles the need to live with a paranoid squatter (Tobias Segal) and to negotiate with a man (Ken Marks), a motivational coach, who just might buy a car.

All this and much more unfolds at its own pace with a growing sense of mystery and dread in Gaye Taylor Upchurch's securely menacing staging. The cast for the start of the Women's Project's 35th season is first rate. The setting -- a generic kitchen that doubles as a car showroom -- feels less like a budget decision than a statement about the interconnection of personal and economic catastrophe.

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