The Three Prosceniums

Director Ralph Nelson has an unusual TV problem: he is afraid of growing stale. Most TV shows live precariously from one 13-week option to the next, but Nelson's I Remember Mama (Fri. 8 p.m., CBS) has been on the air regularly for nearly five years with the same sponsor (General Foods), the same basic cast, the same editor, Frank Gabrielson, and the same producer, Carol Irwin. Veteran actors Peggy Wood and Judson Laire are still playing a lovable pair of Norwegian immigrants in San Francisco; Robin Morgan, Dick Van Patten and Rosemary Rice are still their Americanized children. Everyone has just gotten a little older.

Nelson keeps his actors fresh by rehearsing them less than any other dramade show on the air--only six hours a week before going on camera. He tries to avoid directorial "writer's cramp" in himself by taking on outside chores with other shows and other networks, e.g., directing such westerns as ABC's Outlaw's Reckoning or such thrillers as Brandenburg Gate, as a refreshing change of pace.

An ex-fighter pilot, Nelson, 37, served his apprenticeship on Broadway as a playwright (The Wind Is Ninety) and as an actor and stage manager in a six-year stint with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. He thinks the theater and television are on divergent courses. TV, he argues, has a different pace than the stage and infinitely more mobility: "I use three cameras on each show and, in effect, have three prosceniums." TV actors become puppets of the director, since "an actor never knows when a camera might be on or off him."

Nelson is so committed to TV that he recently abandoned work on a legitimate play because "I kept thinking as I wrote it how much better I could tell the story on television." In fact, Nelson finds TV to be all-consuming, even in his off-duty hours. Recently he gave away his own TV set, explaining tensely: "I'd just sit down to watch the 6 o'clock news and the next thing I knew, there I'd be watching the midnight movie."

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