'The Clean House,' a Comedy about the Power of Love and Forgivenes

'The Clean House', a comedy about living, dying and the perfect joke will be presented as a staged reading by PowPAC on Sunday, Jan. 30, at 7 p.m.

Written by Pulitzer-Prize winning Sarah Ruhl, the play tells the story of a live-in maid, Matilde, who would rather crack jokes in the tradition of her recently deceased parents, the funniest couple in Brazil, than clean house. She works for Lane, a doctor who has grown apart from her husband, Charles, and become obsessed with keeping her house tidy, the one thing she can control. Lane's depressed sister, Virginia, finds that cleaning is good therapy, so she covers for Matilde and does the housekeeping duties on the sly. And Charles, a surgeon, is having an affair with Ana, a terminally ill patient, who has a life force Lane never did.