NILES — Murder mysteries and comedies are a staple of any Trumbull New Theatre season.

Ken Ludwig’s “The Game’s Afoot” gives audiences plenty of both as it started a three-weekend run at the community theater on Friday.

The play takes place on Christmas Eve at the palatial home of William Gillette (Thomas Burd), an actor who made his fortune adapting the work of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for the stage and playing detective Sherlock Holmes.

The house is described as the kind of place where God would live, if he could afford it, and it’s equipped with the latest and greatest technological advances of 1936. His mother Martha (Jill Sakonyi) also lives there.

Gillette invites his castmates to his home for the holidays. The guests include his best friend and a philandering husband, Felix Geisel (John Brien) and Felix’s fed-up wife Madge (Taylor Lody) as well as actors Aggie Wheeler (Amy Giovannone) and Simon Bright (Brett Bunker), who reveal they’re now husband and wife, even though Wheeler still pines for Gillette.

The one person no one except William expected on the guest list is Daria Chase (Jacqueline Shannon), a powerful and vicious theater critic and columnist who has savaged all of the attendees in print and once snubbed Martha at a party.

Someone took a shot at Gillette during the curtain call of his final performance as Sherlock Holmes, Wheeler’s husband died from a “skiing accident” in the last year, and the guests learn at the party that someone slit the throat of the stage manager overnight.

No one in the audience should be surprised when the first act ends with a murder.

Directed by Lisa Bennett, “The Game’s Afoot” is heavy on exposition and a bit light on laughs in the first act. Some of that is the result of Ludwig’s script, which spends most of the first half establishing the relationships between the different characters and laying the groundwork for jokes and plot twists that pay off later.

However, the pacing also seemed to be off on opening night. The dialogue didn’t crackle and spark the way it should. Too many lines that could have gotten a laugh didn’t.

The pacing picks up significantly in the second act, as GIllette and the party guests deal with the aftermath of the murder — or is it? — and the arrival of a police inspector (Marisa Keshock). The humor becomes more physical as the characters deal with concealing a not-quite-dead body from the inspector, and the energy level increases as well.

A play filled with characters who are actors provides plenty of opportunities for exaggerated behavior, and TNT’s cast doesn’t let the opportunity slip away. Burd plays Gillette as an actor who lives the Shakespeare line that all the world’s a stage, even slipping into his Sherlock Holmes costume to figure out whether all of these murders and attempted murders are connected.

Lody has impeccable delivery and comedic timing as Madge, and Bunker stands out both for his on-stage role and for designing the set, which conveys the opulence of Gillette’s home on a community theater budget.

And in Ludwig’s play, the non-actor characters have plenty of quirks as well. Sakonyi seems to be having great fun as Gillette’s feisty and heavily sedated mother. And kudos to Lacee Loo Who, who is a picture of calm in lunacy around her as Martha’s dog, Portia.

Clocking in at right around two hours, including intermission, “The Game’s Afoot” is light, breezy entertainment for a blustery January.

If you go …

WHAT: “The Game’s Afoot”

WHEN: 7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday through Jan. 27 and 3 p.m. Jan. 21 and 28

WHERE: Trumbull New Theatre, 5883 Youngstown Warren Road, Niles.

HOW MUCH: Tickets are $17 for adults and $15 for students and

are available online at trumbull

newtheatre.tix.com and by calling 330-652-1103.