What was going on when I was born?

Theater in America used to mean Broadway. The great playwrights wrote for Broadway and Broadway was their showcase, the place where things began. All that has changed. Partly, economics have made it practically unthinkable for a straight play to originate on Broadway. But if Broadway is no longer synonymous with the theater in America, that is largely because of the regional theater movement that took root in this country over the last 25 years. That movement has created opportunities for theater artists to live and work in such cities as Atlanta, San Francisco, Chicago, Louisville and Seattle, instead of having to migrate to New York to be where the action is. It has nurtured writers as diverse as Sam Shepard and Beth Henley, David Mamet and Lanford Wilson, Marsha Norman and Charles Fuller. Many of the plays that go to Broadway have originated in one of these regional theaters, and an entire repertory of American drama of merit has sprung up from all over the country, which has made it possible for a play to have a life without ever treading the Great White Way.

It is a poignant irony that Werner Rainer Fassbinder's ''Berlin Alexanderplatz,'' which has been acclaimed by some critics as a masterwork, is the tale of a man who struggles to be honest and upright - a lusty struggle that brings him women, friendship, vitality - but who finally succumbs, first to an earthly satan and then to the banality of a petty job polishing rich men's limousines. Throughout his short, frenzied and astonishingly prolific life, the Wunderkind of the postwar German film was mesmerized by the figure of Franz Biberkopf, the proletarian protagonist of Alfred D"oblin's ''Berlin Alexanderplatz,'' a novel that enjoys a place in modern German letters akin to Joyce's ''Ulysses.'' Beginning with the director's earliest work, Biberkopf is a Fassbinder leitmotif. A 1969 film entitled ''Love is Colder Than Death'' is a cameo ''Berlin Alexanderplatz,'' in which Fassbinder himself plays an ex-convict named Franz who resists the efforts of the syndicate to involve him again in crime. Explicitly or otherwise, this theme of life and love as a power struggle runs through his films, culminating in the 15 1/2 hour ''Alexanderplatz,'' which first appeared on West German television in serial form in 1980. It will have its New York theater premiere in five installments at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema starting Wednesday Aug. 10 and ending Sept. 6.

BACK in November 1979, armed Iranian students stormed the gates of the United States Embassy in Teheran and took 62 Americans - and America - hostage. While the human drama grabbed most of the headlines, it quickly became clear that more than political fortunes were dashed in the upheaval. The economic warfare that ensued also dealt a devasting blow to many United States banks and businesses that had billions of dollars invested there. Since Iran, other crises abroad - from the political turmoil in El Salvador to the economic instability of Brazil - have further shaken the corporate confidence of many American multinationals. ''You can't be complacent about investments anywhere,'' said Robert O. Anderson, the chief executive officer of the Atlantic Richfield Company. ''Mexico is the latest case in point. Two or three years ago it looked like a sure financial success, but now it's just the opposite.''

Only three years ago ranchers grazed more than 40,000 sheep on the lush fields amid the sagebrush hills along the Snake River. Now there are fewer than half that number of sheep here. Five of the county's major sheep ranchers have sold out, in some cases replacing their flocks with cattle herds. At least one other operator has filed for bankruptcy. ''We like to say that sheepherding is the second oldest profession in the world,'' said John Faulkner, a third- generation sheep rancher here whose flock of 12,000 is the largest in the state. ''But the way things are going, I don't know if the industry can survive, at least not the way we have traditionally known it in the Western range states.''

HOMEOWNERS who have been paying off a mortgage for 15 years or more often reach the point where they would like to wipe out the debt entirely. Those facing retirement seek the comfort of knowing that the roof over their heads is free and clear, and that nobody can take it away from them as long as they can pay taxes and maintenance. ''It's an easier way for many of these people to live,'' said Salvatore Randazzo, vice president of mortgage servicing at the Williamsburgh Savings Bank. In the past, tax and personal-finance advisers have cautioned borrowers against taking this step. That old loan, they have argued, probably carries a rate of interest far below anything they could ever get again.

Some time before the end of the year, Queens will get a new police precinct, designated the 115th, which will cover the Jackson Heights section. To house its personnel, a new station house is being built on the corner of Northern Boulevard and 92d Street.

EVEN the navigator on the leading American boat believes it is likely that the United States will not win the America's Cup this year. It's never happened before, not in 132 years; the monopoly is the longest winning streak in sports. But now, midway through the trials to select the defender and the challenger for the 25th cup defense, it appears entirely possible that the next cup races will be held in Australia. Those on the inside of the America's Cup trials tend to agree that, with its remarkable speed and maneuverability, Australia II will take the cup, and all the tradition and pride it represents, from its glass-enclosed pedestal in the New York Yacht Club on Manhattan's West 44th Street home to The Royal Perth Yacht Club in Western Australia. Halsey Herreshoff, the navigator on Liberty, wrote in a memorandum to the New York Yacht Club that if the "peculiar keel design of Australia II is allowed to remain in competition or is allowed to continue to be rated without penalty, the yacht. . . will likely win the America's Cup in 1983."

It is cheeky, deliciously bold. The Metropolitan Opera in New York hasn't done it in decades. But on the strength of one man's vision and contagious drive, the Boston Lyric Opera Company - previously a small operator in the operatic world - has just mounted productions of all four parts of Richard Wagner's mammoth epic, ''Der Ring des Nibelungen,'' in one week. And then, as if that were not enough to prove its mettle, the company is proceeding straight into the mouth of the dragon. It is taking the ''Ring'' cycle to New York, where it opens tomorrow night at the Beacon Theater only a week after finishing the four performances here at Northeastern University. ''To do the thing at all is audacious,'' John Balme, the company's general director, said happily at an afternoon rehearsal, as a tenor warmed up in the background, and bits of scenery rose and fell on cables on the stage. ''To take it to New York is aggravated audaciousness.''

During the past 15 years, Nissho-Iwai, a Japanese trading company, made its name in real estate by building some 18,000 condominium units throughout Japan. Now the company is making its bid for a share of the New York condominium development market with its first project in the United States: a 21-story condominium apartment building at 124 East 79th Street between Park and Lexington Avenues. The East 79th Street condominium, as well as others planned by the Japanese company, will be built through its real-estate concern, Sun Realty Corporation. The apartment building will rise on a 66- by 100-foot parcel that is now occupied by two four-story buildings scheduled for demolition. The architect for the residential structure, Peter Samton of the Gruzen Partnership, said the main goal was to design a building that fit gracefully with the other ''street-wall'' facades in the block.

It was 25 years ago in May that the philanthropist Vivian Beaumont Allen gave $3 million to Lincoln Center to further, in her words, the ''cherished hope that our country might one day have a national theater comparable in distinction and achievement to the Comedie Fran,caise.'' Mrs. Allen died in 1962; the theater bearing her name opened in 1965; we all know what has happened since. The Vivian Beaumont resembles the Comedie Fran,caise only in that its dilemmas often have the flavor of farce. Now under its third regime, the theater at Lincoln Center has been dark for five of the past six seasons. It is run by a board that is fond of commissioning new blueprints for the Beaumont's interior renovation but has yet failed to attract either the funds to effect the reconstruction or the first-rank theater artists who might use the house once it has been rebuilt. In Richmond Crinkley, the Beaumont has an executive director who apparently does not regard the crisis at Lincoln Center as worthy of his full attention: since he was appointed in 1979, he has co-produced as many plays in the commercial theater (''Tintypes,'' ''Poor Little Lambs'' and Broadway's current ''Passion'') as he has at the Beaumont. Two weeks ago, the board - inexplicably convening without the presence of either its chairman or president - rewarded Mr. Crinkley's efforts by extending his contract for two years.

IN one quiet corner of this resort, behind the greenhouses of The Breakers, Cornelius Vanderbilt's Italianate palazzo, Helen Winslow wonders which arrangements of snapdragons, delphinia, dahlias and daisies will be most suitable for the Preservation Society of Newport County's triennial America's Cup Ball two weeks hence. In a less bucolic sport under a Cinzano cocktail umbrella on Bannister's Wharf, Dick Sadler, a former crewman on Courageous, his serious charting of the offshore weather for the 12-Meter racing boats over with, thinks about a recurring and more recent Newport tradition in which he dresses outlandishly in a dress and oversized deck shoes and tours the bars of the wharf, mingling with the so-called "racer chasers." Two Newports, quite apart, coexist on this island the Indians called Aquidneck, and it is only sailing and the America's Cup which occasionally bring them together, however tenuously. Old Newport, that still vital bastion of old money, old names and social arbitration, which reveres its customs as much as it does its collection of extravagant "cottages" along Bellevue Avenue and Ocean Drive, tolerates New Newport, a revitalized, somewhat brash tourists' mecca of nautically-themed boutiques, dockside discos and clapboard restorations along the cobblestones of Thames Street. Perhaps tolerate is too patronizing a word. Old Newport needs New Newport because it brings in most of the millions of dollars which make possible the preservation of Old Newport. And New Newport knows that it is needed.

In 1898 Ernest Flagg, the architect of the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., built an estate on Staten Island called Stone Court. For the main house he drew upon Dutch colonial and Caribbean architectural influences, as well as the American colonial tradition.