“The thing about an urban legend is that it never happened to the person tellin’ it. It always happened to someone else.”

So intones Kimberly Gilbert at the top of The K of D, Laura Schellhardt’s spooky, richly-layered mystery, now in its world-premiere run at Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company. The show is less a whodunit? than a whatthefuk?, though who-done-what is necessarily foremost on Gilbert’s mind: She plays all 12 of the play’s roles, hopscotching from the personages of goth queen Steffi Post to patrician English teacher Mrs. McGraw to strutting small-town terrorist Johnny Whistler — sometimes all in a single sentence — with only the tools of her voice and body to tell us who’s carrying the narrative baton in any particular moment. That Gilbert is able to pull this off without it seeming flashy or affected marks her as one of D.C.’s most prodigious onstage talents. (We should probably share the love with Assistant Director Jennifer Mendenhall, who is credited as Gilbert's dialect coach.)

Of course, it helps that Laura Schellhardt has delivered a script uniquely suited to the one-actor, many-parts treatment, one that brings a hazy but never sloppy ambiguity to the events of a long-ago summer in an East Ohio town “close to Indiana, and nothing else.” The title is shorthand for “The Kiss of Death,” but we’ll leave it there: Synopsis would only diminish this somber-but-hopeful tale of kids finding their own way in a world of absent, clueless, or disinterested adults.

Kimberly Gilbert receives a strange visitation in Woolly Mammoth's The K of D. Photo by Stan Barouh.

And anyway, The K of D is at least as much a triumph of staging, tone and mood as it is of story. Director John Vreeke and designer Marie-Noelle Daigneault, working in Woolly’s cozy Rehearsal Hall, put the stage right up in the audience’s face. It’s framed by what look like bedsheets, which give the show a sort of school-play look. Naturally, this pseudo-amateurishness is the product of skilled pros working at the top of their game, sort of like how Wes Anderson's films work very hard to make real locations look like film sets and film sets look like community-theater stages. But even better are the show’s low-tech, high-impact methods of simulating a car crash and and flyover by a gigantic, possibly-supernatural heron, each one a leitmotif.

Keeping up with the prismatic tale’s frequent shifts in perspective is a bit of a workout for the audience, but one that pays off generously. You emerge with the feeling of having just been told a deeply satisfying campfire story. For the cold, cold nights of January, there’s nothing better.

The K of D (approx. one hour, 45 minutes with a 10-min. intermission) is at Woolly Mammoth through Feb. 10. Tickets are available here.