“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.