December 1, 1985

Another housing community developed by Levitt Homes is rising on Long Island. Known as Woodcrest, it will number 110 houses on 51 acres in Coram, in Suffolk County.

Two armed men wearing ski masks entered the parish house of St. Patrick's Cathedral last night, handcuffed four ushers and escaped with money gathered in collection boxes earlier in the day, the police said. The robbers, brandishing revolvers, forced two ushers to empty the safe in the basement of the parish house at 8:50 P.M., according to a police spokesman, Lieut. Edwin LeSchack. The safe contained an unknown amount of cash, including the day's collection box proceeds.

Christmas Stocking You would think only Santa would know what products will be in oversupply this Christmas. But Midge Ivie Tyner, chairman of Tradewell Industries in New York City, says she can usually make a good guess. Her company, which buys excess inventories and resells them to chains and discounters, thrives on the miscalculations of manufacturers and retilers. According to Miss Tyner, if the economy has had a good year, her purchases tend to be limited to newfangled products - ''items that come out and then don't make it.'' But in an average year - last year and this, for example - she buys up items whose popularity has been overestimated by manufacturers and retailers. Last year, she says, fashion jeans fell into that category.

Whatever else any great American playwright has done, each one has created, and in turn become identified with, a personal vision of the American family. If anything, the measure of achievement in American drama has been a writer's ability to place a vivid family portrait within a larger, societal frame - or, more to the point, to make the family represent not only the writer's inner life but a set of outer conditions. One thinks of Arthur Miller's men, hustlers who lived through one Great Depression and live in fear of another; of Tennessee Williams's women, cut loose with the fall of the plantation aristocracy and thrown into the cruel cities. O'Neill, Odets, Inge, Albee - all conjure images of the family at war with itself. And in a cycle of family plays stretching over a decade - and culminating with the opening of the newest one, ''A Lie of the Mind,'' on Thursday at the Promenade -Sam Shepard has painted a picture of domestic disharmony as striking as any to have preceded it. The wastrel father of ''Curse of the Starving Class,'' the Cain-and-Abel brothers of ''True West,'' the incestuous lovers of ''Fool for Love'' have become indelible characters in the contemporary American theater. So, too, has Mr. Shepard staked his claim to the landscapes - both geographical and psychological - of the rootless American Southwest and the beleaguered Middle Western farm belt.

A CHEERFUL gurgle from the faucet was one of the sounds of thankfulness last week as many New Yorkers, reveling in the city's announcement that rainfall had ended the seven-month drought emergency, let the water run while they brushed their teeth. Before restricted-flow shower heads could thud into too many wastebaskets, however, the Environmental Protection Commissioner, Joseph T. McGough Jr., warned that the city would seek to impose certain restrictions permanently. Miserly shower heads were on the list, along with requirements that commercial car washers use well water and that large buildings recycle the accumulated condensation from steam pipes by using it in their air conditioning systems instead of collecting it and throwing it out.