An Old-Fashioned Family Murder, which premiered last Friday night at George Street Playhouse, New Brunswick, N.J., is first-rate old-fashioned fun! This new comedy-mystery, written by Joe DiPietro and directed by Larry Raben, will be delighting audiences through November 2. It’s Tony Award-winner DiPietro’s eighth production at the Playhouse, and he and the theater clearly work beautifully together.

The play nicely echoes the whodunnit tropes and characters of the Golden Age of detective stories, starting with the secluded ritzy Claythorne mansion, isolated by a dramatic storm (lots of stage lightning and thunder). Set in 1943, the opening scenes give Arthur Whittington (played by Tony Carlin)—an insufferably pedantic and self-satisfied author of second-rate mysteries—the chance to rattle on. One of his pet themes is why a mere woman could never be a stellar detective. (Yes, you know from this point on that a woman will put him in his place).

Over the course of the evening, the two twenty-something Claythorne sisters, Dotty (Caitlin Kinnunen), who dresses like her own grandmother, and Clarice (Allison Scagliotti), the epitome of glamour, plus Clarice’s fiancé, Jasper Jamison (Michael Evan Williams), a pool boy at the country club, come to loathe the author. He plays a game of what if? that reveals all three have a motive to kill the ancient Claythorne patriarch, soundly sleeping upstairs: Dotty, because she’s treated like a servant, Clarice because Daddy objects to Jasper, and Jasper himself. When Whittington reveals he’s been invited there in order to witness a new will the old man has created—one that cuts one of the daughters out entirely—that really puts the cat among the pigeons.

Now appears the leader of Dotty’s mystery book club, Shirley Peck (Sally Struthers—yes, that one!) who has distinctly different views about lady detectives. When everyone goes to bed, a murder does occur. Again you’ll recognize the tropes of classic detective fiction, but DiPietro’s script is full of laugh-out-loud lines that make them fresh again. Police detective Paul Peck (James Taylor Odom), Mrs. Peck’s son, arrives to investigate.

Under the not-so-steely gaze of the law, the players circle each other warily. The sisters’ claws come out; the laughs do too. The doting Mrs. Peck and her somewhat bumbling son play off each other perfectly, chemistry that may in part reflect Struthers and Odom’s past stage appearances together. Struthers’s performance of a woman struggling (and mostly failing) to keep a low profile, to let her son shine, is fascinating to watch. Her gestures and expressions, no matter how small, are exactly right.

Tickets for An Old-Fashioned Family Murder are available here or by calling 732-246-7717.