March 28, 1986

The Senate tonight narrowly approved President Reagan's request to send $100 million to the rebels trying to depose the Nicaraguan Government. The vote was 53 to 47, as 42 Republicans and 11 Democrats supported the President in what he has called one of the major foreign policy tests of his second term. The request was opposed by 36 Democrats and 11 Republicans. Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Indiana Republican who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, said the Senate had adopted a ''new corollary to the Reagan doctrine'' that would increase pressure on the Sandinistas to negotiate with the insurgents and respect the rights of their neighbors. Leading Democrat Is Opposed But Senator Jim Sasser of Tennessee, a leading Democratic spokesman, sharply disagreed, saying of today's vote: ''I think it takes us farther down the road to the intervention of American military forces. It signals the abandonment of the last effort at a negotiated settlement.''

Stanley M. Friedman, a former deputy mayor who is the Bronx Democratic leader, was indicted yesterday on charges of bribing Donald R. Manes and a Parking Violations Bureau official to obtain fraudulently a $22 million contract for a computer company he represented. Mr. Friedman has long been regarded as one of the most aggressive and influential political figures in the city. He was accused of secretly holding as much as $1.4 million worth of the company's stock for Mr. Manes, the former Queens Borough President who killed himself this month, and for Geoffrey G. Lindenauer, who, as deputy director of the parking agency, pushed successfully for approval of the contract in 1984 with Citisource Inc. Mr. Friedman, who surrendered shortly before 8 A.M. at the office of Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan District Attorney, at 1 Hogan Place, was transferred two blocks by police van to the central booking facility at 1 Police Plaza. A Statement of Innocence The grim-looking, 50-year-old lawyer and politician, who only two months ago was among a select handful of the city elite to attend a private swearing in of Mayor Koch at Gracie Mansion, draped a light-colored raincoat over his handcuffs. After his arraignment in State Supreme Court, he issued a statement asserting his innocence and predicting ''vindication in a court of law.''

Two of New York City's most prominent nursing homes and three of their officials were indicted yesterday on charges of soliciting $55,000 in contributions in return for admitting Medicaid patients. The special state prosecutor for Medicaid fraud, Edward J. Kuriansky, said the chief fund-raiser for the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale in the Bronx and the executive director and the fund-raiser for the Menorah Nursing Home in Brooklyn had been indicted by grand juries in the Bronx and Brooklyn on charges of violating the state's Public Health Law in illegally soliciting contributions from the relatives of patients seeking admission. There was no allegation that any official from the two nonprofit homes took any funds for personal profit.

''I THINK theater is a conversation between the stage and the audience,'' said Randy Nelson, known as Alyosha of the Flying Karamazov Brothers. ''It's a conversation in which one party has the bulk of the speech, but we're all there in one room together; the artist is important and so is the theatergoer, because both are shaping the waveform in that room. If, as an actor, you don't spend your entire energy listening, you're just not doing the job.'' For the Flying Karamazov Brothers, who will begin a monthlong engagement called ''Juggling and Cheap Theatrics'' at the Vivian Beaumont Theater tonight, ''listening'' to the audience may mean fending off - or topping - awful puns and juggling the most unlikely objects that audience members can produce. And they're not the only performers who expect theatergoers to speak up. At ''The Mystery of Edwin Drood,'' the audience votes to decide who done it. For ''Penn and Teller,'' the audience supplies unwary volunteers. Even the Temptations, who are playing the Minskoff Theater with the Four Tops, pull fans from the crowd to sing ''My Girl.'' And at two productions reopening this weekend in New York -''The Alchemedians'' at the Lamb's Theater and that of the Flying Karamazov Brothers, the audience makes every show different.

Investigations of corruption in the New York City government are likely to go on for two more years, a key Federal investigator said yesterday, as Federal agents and prosecutors pursue allegations about wrongdoing beyond the Parking Violations Bureau. The special agent in charge of the criminal division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's New York office, James H. Yelvington, said that as the city's corruption scandal unfolded in recent months, the bureau doubled, to 52, the number of agents examining the allegations of corruption. 'We Hope It Continues' ''We have some areas of investigation that we believe will be long-term,'' Mr. Yelvington said. ''A lot of information has come in to us. We hope it continues. I anticipate these investigations will go on at least two years.''