What was going on when I was born?

THE father figure in Bill Thompson's adaptation of ''Hansel and Gretel'' is a performer who lives for art but can't eke out a living. He represents man's spiritual nature, which needs to be nourished against materialistic odds. The theme proved portentous. After last Sunday's twilight performance of the fable at the Harry Chapin Center for the Performing Arts in Huntington Station, the theater, which had been on the brink of bankruptcy, shut its doors permanently. The following evening, the board of directors met and found no alternative but to cancel the balance of the season because of insufficient funds. Regrets to subscribers were mailed yesterday. Tomorrow, the legal steps are expected to begin.

Turned up to a high pitch and filtered through a true writer's sensibility, anger is once again proving to be a powerful force in the theater. Just how powerful is being demonstrated by the proliferation of angry plays of all shapes and sizes on New York stages this season -from the eight-and-a-half-hour ''Nicholas Nickleby'' on Broadway to Shirley Lauro's 25-minute ''Open Admissions'' Off Off Broadway. The anger comes in a variety of forms, too. While some of it is political anger aimed at social injustice, much of it is personal, psychological or existential. In his savage comedy ''Grown Ups,'' Jules Feiffer gives us a hero who decides to expiate a lifetime of emotional grievances with his middle-class Jewish family. Christopher Durang's ''Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You'' begins as a satire of Roman Catholic ritual and ends up crying out against the seeming indifference of God. But whatever their variations in subject or attack, the best of the new angry plays share a common purpose and achievement - to make the audience squirm uncomfortably in its seats.

It has taken special legislation and 42 years of negotiations, but for 1,200 residents of Broad Channel, Queens, the day appears finally to be coming when they will be able to call their homes their own. Residents have had to live under a permanent threat of eviction because, although they own their own homes, the land under their houses is owned by the city. The land leases are for a period of one year only, and the city hasth e option to terminate the leases at the end of each period and gi ve homeowners 10 days' notice to leave. ''Living under the lease arrangement has meant living under constant pressure,'' said Daniel Tubridy, a restaurant owner who grew up in Broad Channel and whose parents and grandparents all live in the community. ''You realize that there is a serious threat, but also that the city could never move you out. We would go to the streets if we had to.''

SOME people on Wall Street have their own name for the new tax law. They call it the ''Accountants' Relief Act,'' and they're not far off. The radical changes that Congress enacted last year in the nation's tax system is translating into big business for accountants this year, when those provisions take effect. And 1982 shapes up as the year of the accountant, if there ever was one. ''Accounting flourishes when there is change,'' said Henry Gunders, co-chairman at Price, Waterhouse & Company, which ranks No. 4 among the elite Big Eight firms that dominate the accounting profession. Russell E. Palmer, chairman of Touche Ross & Company, the No. 8 firm, added that ''1981 was our best year ever. And 1982 will be even better.'' The accounting business is bursting not only in the Park Avenue towers where the leading firms are based, but also in the offices of certified public accountants throughout the land. Greater demands by municipalities, businesses and individuals for more precise information of all types, particulary more accurate financial information, have made the accountant a much sought-out individual. Everybody seems to need accountants. ''You have much more complex problems that you are dealing with,'' explained William L. Raby, chairman of the Federal tax division of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. ''It's not enough to be somebody who knows a little about taxes. That's becoming dangerous.''

The following dispatch is based on information arriving from Poland. Sources with knowledge of Lech Walesa, the Solidarity leader, said yesterday that he had set pre-conditions for negotiating with the Government. One was that the talks be on neutral ground. He has also reportedly demanded that the rest of the 18-member union presidium and three advisers be present.

Just when it seemed that the old year had been put safely away, a look into the crystal ball suggests that 1981 in European dance may well be part of 1982 in the United States. Last year's European premiere is shaping up increasingly as this year's European import. Consider some examples. There is Rudolf Nureyev's ''Don Quixote,'' in repertory in Paris-Vienna-Oslo-Zurich-Verona, which is about to be toured around the United States in the spring by the Boston Ballet. There is the Paris Opera Ballet's 1979 reconstruction of ''Sylvia'' - danced, incidentally, in the same version by the Peking Ballet - which is scheduled for an American premiere in March by the Washington Ballet. A selective armchair survey of Europe's dance season, frequently ignored here, seems to be very much in order. The overall trends are clear enough. One is, as the Swedish critic, Erik Naslund, lamented in Dance News, ''that one sees the very same merchandise, whether watching ballet in Copenhagen, London, Berlin, Zurich, Vienna or Amsterdam.'' Not only are choreographers such as Glen Tetley, Hans van Manen and Jiri Kylian seemingly ubiquitous from Scandinavia to Italy, but they are often represented by the very same ballets.

Autos Await Renewel Last year, when domestic auto sales were weaker than expected - at only 6 million cars - everyone from local distributors to Lee A. Iacocca, Chrysler's chairman, blamed high interest rates. Now, the prime rate has dropped from more than 20 percent to 15 3/4 percent, but industry analysts do not expect the drop to cause much of a revival in car sales. This year, Alfred C. Nelson, an automobile analyst at A.G. Becker & Company, expects domestic car sales of 6.8 million. Yet, he describes the gain as a ''struggling, laborious recovery,'' due to the absence of large commercial banks which usually begin promoting automobile financing once business loan demand weakens.

ABRAHAM VICTOR and his wife, Rose, enjoyed the movie ''Reds.'' They were just disappointed by the scenes depicting the Croton-on-Hudson home that was once the residence of the main subjects of the film, the journalists-activists John Reed and Louise Bryant. The recreation of the house, they say, was ''concocted.'' The Victors ought to know. They own it. Mr. Reed and Miss Bryant are being portrayed by Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in the three-and-a-half hour film dramatizing the lives of the two, who were embroiled in some of the hotter political issues of their day - trade unionism, pacifism and Communism. Both were in Moscow when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917 and both wrote extensively on the subject. The movie, produced, directed and cowritten by Mr. Beatty, spends about 15 minutes on the home lived in intermittently by the Reeds from 1916 to 1920.

The Saudi Foreign Minister said in an interview today that in return for Israeli recognition of Palestinian rights and the return of occupied Arab lands, his Government was prepared ''to accept'' Israel. Asked why Israel should risk returning the occupied lands when Arab nations and Palestinians were not willing to recognize Israel explicitly, the Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, answered: ''It cannot respond to the present-day situation based on what Hitler did in World War II. Arab countries did not accept Israel before, in 1948. The change has taken some doing. There has been a tremendous shift on the part of Arab countries to accept this situation.'' Prince Fahd's Meaning Is Clarified He said this was the meaning of Crown Prince Fahd's recent proposal ''confirming the right of the countries of the region to live in peace.'' Until this interview, the Saudis had declined to say whether the word countries specifically included Israel.

WASHINGTON IN the real estate offices, economists' suites and counting houses of the nation's capital, an uneasy consensus is forming: Washington, which long has considered itself immune to such things, is falling prey to recession. Retail sales have been sluggish. Home construction in the area, the site of one of the strongest housing booms in the East, has virtually stopped. Employment agencies are flooded with erstwhile Government employees looking for work. The District of Columbia's unemployment rate, averaging no more than 7.5 percent in 1979 and 1980, had jumped to a 9.1 percent rate by November. ''Washington hasn't escaped,'' said Andrew F. Brimmer, an economic consultant and a former member of the Federal Reserve Board. The year 1981, said J. Pat Galloway, president of the Greater Washington Board of Trade, ''has proven that Washington is not recession-proof.''

In state capitals across the nation, the once positive response to President Reagan's ''new federalism'' plan to return authority from the Federal Government to the states has turned sour as budget cuts and the recession squeeze many state treasuries. No state is moving to fill the gap left either by the Reagan Administration's deep cuts in Federal social services administered by the states or by the reductions in Federal aid to cities. And even conservative supporters of the President say about the only authority state officials have received so far is to decide which services should be cut. State Officials Interviewed Those were among the findings in interviews with officials in all 50 state capitals, which also disclosed that, after years of relative growth and prosperity, many states face budget deficits, new taxes or reductions in services and personnel. Reactions are varied in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where the economy has been relatively stable. Only Connecticut is considering both new taxes and service cuts. New York, with an already lean budget, may face tax increases, but New Jersey officials expect a surplus and may even cut business taxes.

SECONDS after 6 P.M. on Sept. 2, 1980, the first chord of Herbie Hancock's ''Maiden Voyage'' was sent over the airwaves by WYRS-FM, the 3,000-watt radio station in Stamford. The selection was anything but random, for WYRS was prepared to supplant WRVR-FM as the only full-time, commercial jazz station in the New York metropolitan area Six days later, the final elegiaic strains of Charles Mingus' ''Goodbye Pork Pie Hat'' gave way on WRVR to Waylon Jennings' ''Are You Ready for the Country?'' -a rhetorical question since the shift to country music had just been made. The abrupt, unannounced change startled and angered jazz musicians, merchants and listeners, so much so that now, nearly 16 months later, they fear a similar ''persecution'' will follow the Dec. 17 transfer of the licenses of WYRS and its companion station, WSTC-AM, to Radio Stamford Inc. Nothing is certain about the consequence of the transfer: Radio Stamford must wait at least 30 days for final approval by the Federal Communications Commission of its $1.8 million purchase from Western Connecticut Broadcasting Company, and Alphonsus J. Donahue, the company president, is maintaining a noncommittal posture on WYRS's programming. But a group called Friends of Jazz on WYRS has already mounted a campaign of letters and petitions, and they say that advertisements and a fund-raising concert are possible tactics in the future. The group trumpets both wariness and ire in a majo r key.