Tatjana in Color at Prologue Theatre Company | Theater review

In April 1912, Austrian artist Egon Schiele, a painter of intense, slightly grotesque figures, was arrested in the small town of Neulengbach, 20 miles outside Vienna, on suspicion of diddling little girls. Though the charges were eventually dropped, the matter still raises what we might call the Roman Polanski question: Should we overlook the skeevy behavior of gifted artists or hold them to the same moral standard that applies to the rest of us?

In her 2005 drama, Jordan reimagines the scandal from the girl’s point of view. Tatjana, a precocious 12-year-old, meets Egon one day when he gives her an orange while she’s playing with her sister. Before you know it, Tatjana’s spending all her free time at the painter’s studio, sipping coffee, learning about womanhood from Egon’s muse, Wally, and posing for the artist without her clothes on. Jordan admirably resists turning Tatjana into a one-dimensional victim and Egon a big bad wolf. In fact, the girl’s presented as a willing accomplice in the loss of her innocence. But in turning the events into a coming-of-age tale, Jordan never squarely deals with the squirmworthy stuff that goes on in the studio. Thorny moral questions go unasked.

Prologue’s production offers a winningly guileless performance from Johnson as Tatjana and some welcome comic relief in Plen’s take on Tatjana’s permanently aggrieved younger sister. Ritchey’s snail-paced staging, however, has an aimless, indolent quality that makes any sense of urgency or forward momentum nigh on impossible.