Wicked weapons festooning the walls. Unscrupulous playwrights plotting plots. Debts due and money to be made. Remote rural retreat. What could go wrong?

“Deathtrap,” written by Ira Levin and directed by Kim Carson, offers an evening of murder mystery, unsavory characters and handy lethal weapons, through Oct. 23, Pennsylvania Playhouse.

The Oct. 7 performance was seen for this review.

University professor Sidney Bruhl (Robert Callan Adams) is a frustrated playwright reduced to teaching the craft to “twerps” who attend his seminars. His bills pile up and his future looks bleak as he realizes he will never again write a hit play.

When former student Clifford Andrson (Michael Jasper) sends Professor Bruhl a play that he has just dashed off for a critical read and suggestions, Bruhl realizes that the student’s play will be a tremendous hit and great financial success that couldn’t be ruined by even a “gifted director.”

His wife, Myra Bruhl (Gloria Millheim), is, while pretty and charming, the spark to the coming conflagration: “Sidney? Would you actually kill someone to have a successful play?”

Jasper is well-suited for the role of genius writer-cum-murderous-house-guest. His fight scenes with Sidney, who is brilliant in the role, are realistically rough and tumble.

Most charming in the talented cast is psychic Helga ten Dorp (April Lindenmuth), who leavens the plot with foreboding insights received by touching chairs where characters have sat, holding objects or passing her hands over the body of her hostess.

“What gives you pain, dear lady?” asks Helga.

“Nothing. I’m fine, really,” Myra tells the psychic.

“Helga ten Dorp knows better: No, no. Something you see pains you.”

Family lawyer Porter Milgrim (Bill Joachim) is efficient and proper, but when he and Helga-turned-psychic-blackmailer see the chance to make some fast and loose money, a broad, greedy streak in both of them emerges.

Brett Oliveira, assisted by Corinne Philbin as Light Board Operator, get credit for set and lighting design. They have built a comfortable study where the two competing playwrights write and scheme and bodies start to pile up on the carpets. The collection of medieval swords, maces, manacles, daggers and modern pistols all lend a terrific air of foreboding.

“Deathtrap:” 7:30 p.m. Oct. 14, 15, 21, 22; 3 p.m. Oct. 16, 23. Tickets: www.paplayhouse.org; 610-865-6665