Thursday, August 14 NET PLAYHOUSE (NET, 8-9:30 p.m.).* "The National Theater of the Deaf, Encore" presents talented actors who perform entirely in sign language a Kabuki drama and Anton Chekhov's monologue "On the Harmfulness of Tobacco."

Friday, August 15

SUMMER FOCUS (ABC, 8-9 p.m.). Crime in the streets of Washington, D.C., Mafia activities in Buffalo and campus disturbances at Harvard are the focal point for this report on "The Violent Americans."

P.G.A. CHAMPIONSHIP (ABC, 10:30-11 p.m.). Last of golfs four major championships (others: the Masters, the U.S. Open, the British Open). Highlights of the first two rounds of play from the National Cash Register Country Club in Dayton. Coverage continues with the third round live Saturday from 5-6:30 p.m. and the final round Sunday from 5-7 p.m.

Sunday, August 17

SINGER PRESENTS ELVIS (NBC, 9-10 p.m.). Old idols never die. They just repeat their high-rated television specials.

Monday, August 18

NET JOURNAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). A study of "The Battered Child" shows children recovering from parental abuse at the Colorado Medical Center. Repeat.

THE MERV GRIFFIN SHOW (CBS, 11:30 p.m.1 a.m.). Host Merv Griffin, long popular in a syndicated talk show, goes network five nights a week, as CBS tries to buck the competition of NBC's Johnny Carson and ABC's Joey Bishop.

Tuesday, August 19

NET FESTIVAL (NET, 9-10 p.m.). The story of "The Talgai Skull" tells of a fossilized skull that could be the missing link between prehistoric and modern man.

THE DICK CAVETT SHOW (ABC, 10-11 p.m.). The sesquipedalian savant of the talk shows takes on Jimi Hendrix and The Jefferson Airplane.

CBS NEWS SPECIAL (CBS, 10-11 p.m.). Last week's show probing the generation gap between fathers and sons is followed here with an exploration of the chasm between "Mothers and Daughters."

STRAW HAT

Summer theaters around the country al ways see a scattering of new works -- many of them destined for oblivion, but some perhaps heading for Broadway. Among this month's tryouts:

BUTTERFLIES ARE FREE, by Leonard Gershe, is a love story of a blind boy and the girl next door. Keir Dullea, Blythe Danner and Maureen O'Sullivan star. Falmouth, Mass., Aug. 18-23.

CHRISTABEL AND THE RUBICON is a whacky comedy by H. J. Moorman about a young girl beset by all the problems of young womanhood today -- including the older man, the boy next door, and a bewildered father at the other end of the generation gap. Olney, Md., Aug. 26-Sept. 14.

ENCOUNTERS is a musical that explores the emotions and fantasies of Romeo and Juliet through song and dance. It was conceived by Paul Zakrzewski, who also put the lyrics to Wally Harper's rock-to-romantic score. Aileen Passloff choreographs and directs. Berkshire Theater Festival, Aug. 13-30.

A PLACE FOR POLLY, a new production of Lonnie Coleman's comedy formerly known as She Didn't Say Yes, concerns a girl who has to compete with her older sister for everything--even her own publisher husband. Starring Joan Hackett, Darryl Hickman and Betsy von Furstenberg, the play will open in New Fairfield, Conn., on Aug. 11; in Westport, Conn., Aug. 18; in Ivoryton, Conn., Aug. 25.

LOCK UP YOUR DAUGHTERS is an adaptation by Bernard Miles of Henry Fielding's Rape Upon Rape, a ribald comedy about a corrupt magistrate whose target is damsels in distress. As was the custom of the period, the rapes will not be performed onstage. Music is by Laurie Johnson, lyrics by Lionel Bart, and Murray Matheson, Larry Kert and Travis Hudson star. East Haddam, Conn. Through Aug. 30.

SURPRISE! is a farce by Fred Carmichael, producer-director of the Caravan Theater at the Dorset, Vt., Playhouse, where his latest effort will appear Aug. 27-31.

THE CHIC LIFE is a comedy about a middle-aged couple whose daughter comes home with her baby because it has caused her baseball-player husband to fall into a batting slump as well as a bad temper. The play was written by Arthur Marx, Groucho's son, and Robert Fisher, and features James Whitmore and Audra Lindley. Denver, Colo., Aug. 11-16; Mountainhome, Pa., Aug. 18-23; Dennis, Mass., Aug. 25-30.

THE SOUND OF MURDER echoes in the voices of a wife and her lover who plot the perfect solution to a husband who won't grant a divorce. The drama, by William Fairchild, stars Jeannie Carson, Hurd Hatfield and Biff McGuire. Dennis, Mass., Aug. 11-16; Skowhegan, Me., Aug. 18-23; Ivoryton, Conn., Aug. 25-30.

1491 is a musical by Meredith Willson (The Music Man) that discovers the pre-embarkation intrigues and romances of Christopher Columbus as he inveigles Queen Isabel to sponsor his voyage to the new world. Stars Richard Cullum, Chita Rivera, and Jean Fenn. Los Angeles, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Sept. 2-Oct. 28.

CINEMA

MARRY ME, MARRY ME. This wistful French comedy is the story of the trials of a courtship. Although Claude Berri (The Two of Us) wrote, directed and stars in the film, it is not a one-man show but a commanding display of ensemble acting.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. In the context of the most recent space achievements, Stanley Kubrick's epic film deserves another look. Combining machinery and metaphysics in his tale of a voyage to Jupiter, Kubrick creates a stunning cosmic morality play to which the flight of Apollo 11 adds a tantalizing immediacy.

THE WILD BUNCH. Director Sam Peckinpah renders a vast canvas of the waning West in this drama of men who insist on living by their own outmoded moral code. The performances are faultless and the film is one of the year's best.

TRUE GRIT offers ample proof that John Wayne is alive and well at 62. In possibly his finest role, the Duke plays a hard-drinking frontier marshal who hires on with a teen-age girl (Kim Darby) to bring her father's murderer to justice. Wayne quite obviously has the time of his life, and movie audiences will find that the feeling is infectious.

EASY RIDER. Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper ride their motorcycles cross-country looking for the true meaning of America. The film (directed by Hopper, produced by Fonda and co-authored by Terry Southern) is by turns sensitive and embarrassing--at its best when it shows with compassion the places and faces of mid-America.

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Nicol Williamson plays a heartsick member of the English aristocracy yearning for the love of a brazen movie usherette (Anna Karina) in this skillful adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's novel.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Dustin Hoffman and Newcomer Jon Voight are the real points of interest in John Schlesinger's somewhat slick rendering of James Leo Herlihy's novel of love and loneliness in New York.

THE DEVIL BY THE TAIL Another slight and savage comedy by Philippe de Broca, Devil follows a slick Gallic seducer (Yves Montand) on his rounds. Montand could well become the new Humphrey Bogart if he weren't already so good as the old Yves Montand.

POPI. The plight of the poor is told with humor and bite in this surprisingly successful comedy. Alan Arkin is magnificent as a Puerto Rican widower with three jobs, struggling to get his children out of a New York ghetto.

BOOKS

Best Reading

MYSTERIES OF EASTER ISLAND, by Francis Maziere. The brooding huge monoliths of Easter Island, 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile in the Pacific, have held an abiding fascination for generations of archaeologists. Maziere has new theories about the men who produced them and why, though the impact of his research is somewhat blunted by the fact that boulder-size chunks were lifted from previous work by an obscure Capuchin priest named Father Sebastian Englert.

ALLEN GINSBERG IN AMERICA, by Jane Kramer. Earnest, articulate and somehow despairingly sanguine, Allen Ginsberg has evolved from a minor poet to major cult figure--a kind of one-man air ferry between bohemian and Brahmin traditions. Wisely, perhaps, Author Kramer concentrates on the life rather than the works.

THE MAKING OF THE PRESIDENT 1968, by Theodore H. White. Whether following the poetic figure of Eugene McCarthy into the night or documenting Richard Nixon's electronic conquest of the nation, White is just as diligent as he was in his accounts of the two previous presidential races. However, his protagonist lacks the kind of flamboyance that fires up White's romantic mind, and as a result, a gray pall hangs over much of the book.

H. G. WELLS: HIS TURBULENT LIFE AND TIMES, by Lovat Dickson. Wells sold the masses on the future and the Utopia that science would bring, but Dickson's biography shows that inside the complacent optimist a desperate pessimist was signaling wildly to get out.

ISAAC BABEL: YOU MUST KNOW EVERYTHING, edited by Nathalie Babel. This collection of newly translated short stories, abrupt prose exercises and journalistic sketches by the brilliant Russian-Jewish writer purged by Stalin, demonstrates the individuality that was both Isaac Babel's genius and his death warrant.

THE FOUR-GATED CITY, by Doris Lessing. In the final novel in her Children of Violence series, the author takes her heroine, Martha Quest, from World War II to the present. Then the meticulous, disturbing book proceeds into the future to demonstrate the author's extrasensory conviction that global disaster is at hand.

SONS OF DARKNESS, SONS OF LIGHT, by John A. Williams. In this novel, set in 1973, a normally reasonable Negro civil rights leader hires a gunman to avenge the death of a black boy shot by a white policeman. The result evokes the tragedy of a sleepwalking society that can be awakened only by violence.

WHO TOOK THE GOLD AWAY, by John Leggett. Told with marvelous class and considerable spit and polish, this old-school novel recounts the tale of two Yale classmates who alternately befriend and betray each other well into middle age.

THE KINGDOM AND THE POWER, by Gay Talese. A former New York Times staffer takes his readers far behind the bylines for a gossipy analysis of the workings and power struggles within the nation's most influential newspaper.

THE YEAR OF THE YOUNG REBELS, by Stephen Spender. Mingling on the barricades with American and European student radicals, the Old Left poet and veteran of Spanish Civil War politics reports humanely on New Left ideals and spirit.

Best Sellers

FICTION

1. The Love Machine, Susann (1 last week)

2. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (2)

3. The Godfather, Puzo (3)

4. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (5)

5. Ada, Nabokov (4)

6. The Pretenders, Davis (6)

7. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (8)

8. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (7)

9. Except for Me and Thee, West (10)

10. New Moon Rising, Price

NONFICTION

1. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (2)

2. The Peter Principle, Peter and Hull (1)

3. The Making of the President '68, White (3)

4. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (4)

5. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (5)

6. The 900 Days, Salisbury (8)

7. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (6)

8. Jennie, Martin (7)

9. A Long Row of Candles, Sulzberger

10. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith'

* All times E.D.T.

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