As someone who is often accused of being "devoid of emotion," it's alarming to see one person so vividly portray multiple characters going through multiple emotions in one 90-minute show. In The K of D, an urban legend, actor Renata Friedman cycles impressively through 16 characters from St. Mary's, Ohio, in the process of spinning the urban legend of young Charlotte and her kiss of death.

After getting hit by a car in front of the local school, Charlotte's twin brother gives her a kiss before dying. The local gang of kids suspects that Charlotte has been cursed ever since—anything she kisses ends up dead, too. The ragtag crew, Charlotte's parents, and various townsfolk debate the possibilities. Then there's Johnny Whistler, the tobacco-chewing, dog-beating, rusty-blue-Dodge-driving pedophile hick who ran over Charlotte's brother in the first place. After Johnny's parents pass, he inherits the house next door to Charlotte, transforming him from the forgotten villain into the central one—he starves a dog to spite Charlotte's family and continues to make sexual advances toward her.

With so many colorful characters, why not cast individual actors for each part, as past productions (including one high school version in Chicago) have done? Using multiple actors, playwright Laura Schellhardt explains in the program, makes the story "much more about a community of kids. But when you see it done with one actor, it becomes a psychological journey through one person's past. It's more painful when one actress has to go through all of the hard parts herself, as well as confront her demons, literally by becoming them." The trick works with the talented Friedman, who leaps dexterously between characters and all over the set (a broken-down dock over a lake codesigned by LB Morse and director Braden Abraham). Friedman is aided by Robert Aguilar's evocatively eerie lighting and Matt Starritt's creepy sound design (wind, far-off laughter), creating a genuinely spooky experience.

A side note from this theater novice about intermission: Theaters of Seattle, you need more than one bartender, or the intermission needs to be longer than 15 minutes, convention be damned. "You'd think they'd have two people making drinks," said the charming woman in line. She was right. By the time we had secured our Kiss of Death concoctions (a delightful mix of gin and Chartreuse and some other such business—consuming one and a half of these in three minutes left me giddy for the second act), the get-back-to-your-seat alarm was already sounding. On a possibly related note, my date detected an elevated level of flatulence in the women's bathroom. "It was not normal," she said.