Among the comedies lighting up the summer nights this week:

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. The Peterborough Players. When the lights go down, Peter Shaffer's characters cavort and sport their way through a people-jam in the dark in his hilarious Black Comedy. The Public Eye, another one-acter by Shaffer, follows a seemingly errant young wife.

PROVINCETOWN, MASS. Playhouse. They were extras around Hamlet's Elsinore. When Tom Stoppard's spotlight shines on them in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, they are found to be heroes of flashing wit but blinking comprehension, unsure whether they are involved in a comedy or a tragedy.

WESTPORT, CONN. Country Playhouse. Hans Conried plays a retired Connecticut Yankee chicken farmer who finds New York commuters both the boon and bane of his existence in Herman Shumlin's Spofford, a cut-down version of Peter De Vries' novel, Reuben, Reuben.

LAKE PLACID, N.Y. Playhouse. The characters in the four droll and sometimes touching playlets of Robert Anderson's You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running share a universal preoccupation, sex, as it is used in art, as it wanes in middle age, as it bemuses parents of adolescent children, and as a fading memory of the very old.

HADDONFIELD, N.J. Camden County Music Fair. A bachelor dentist keeps himself from being trapped by telling his mistress that he is married; then when she wants to meet the wife, he puts his nurse through the drill of filling the part in Cactus Flower, a farce that stars Hugh O'Brian and Sheila MacRae.

NEW HOPE, PA. Bucks County Playhouse. The wife of a screwball American runs off with a Negro in Novelist Bruce Jay Friedman's flagellatingly funny first comedy, Scuba Duba.

DAYTON, OHIO. Kenley Players. A psychiatrist can understand everything about adolescents except his own teen-age daughter, who throws the bull in his court during The Impossible Years, by Robert Fisher and Arthur Marx.

ST. LOUIS, MO. Falstaff Theater. Walter Pidgeon is caught up in the vicarious pleasures and hysterical worries of a daddy whose little girl has gone off to college in Take Her, She's Mine, by Phoebe and Henry Ephron.

HOUSTON, TEXAS. Town and Country Dinner Theater. Noel Coward's classic farce Private Lives finds Amanda and Elyot, who were previously married to each other, in adjoining Riviera hotel rooms with their new mates.

LOS ANGELES, CALIF. Ebony Showcase. An all-black cast performs Herb Gardner's A Thousand Clowns, about the friendship of a nonconformist lover of life and his polysyllabic twelve-year-old ward.

MUSIC

Europe in summertime abounds with music for every taste--from esoteric little festivals featuring medieval song to grandiose performances of opera in outdoor splendor, to instrumental concerts in historic settings. Among the highlights:

GLYNDEBOURNE FESTIVAL (through Aug. 3) presents four operas amid the ambiance of a lush, 125-acre Sussex estate. Mozart's Cosi fan tutte and Don Giovanni alternate with Massenet's Werther and Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande.

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL (Aug. 24-Sept. 13) this year has an Italian slant, featuring works by composers from Monteverdi and Corelli to Dallapiccola and Nono. Opera predominates, but the London Symphony Orchestra, the New Philharmonia, and such soloists as Pianists Claudio Arrau and Misha Dichter, Violinists Itzhak Perlman and Nathan Milstein, can also be heard in nonoperatic works from Brahms to Stravinsky.

HASLEMERE FESTIVAL (July 18-26). Nestled in the Surrey woodlands 43 miles south of London, this annual event is directed by Recorder Virtuoso Carl Dolmetsch. The festival is famous for its authentic performances of early music on ancient instruments. The piece de resistance this year is the first modern performance of a Magnificat for four voices by 16th century Belgian Composer Baudoin Hoyoul.

BAYREUTH (July 25-Aug. 28) offers a new production of The Flying Dutchman, conducted by Silvio Varviso, staged by August Everding and designed by Prague's Josef Svoboda; the late Wieland Wagner's staging of Parsifal, Tristan und Isolde and the Ring; Brother Wolfgang's production of Die Meistersinger.

MUNICH (through Aug. 5) is an opera-lover's paradise, with no fewer than 13 works by composers ranging from Mozart, Verdi and Wagner to Native Son Richard Strauss and a premiere by Czechoslovakia's Jan Cikker. For chamber music buffs there will be Liederabende by Baritones Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hermann Prey. Another series of chamber music by Bach, Gabrieli, Gesualdo, Telemann, Haydn, Mozart and Scarlatti will be presented by small instrumental and vocal ensembles in the elegant 18th century Nymphenburg Palace (through July 27).

MONTREUX-VEVEY FESTIVAL (Aug. 29-Oct. 5) offers a varied but traditional program, including Mozart by Yehudi Menuhin's Festival Orchestra, Bach played on the organ by Munich's Karl Richter, Corelli and Vivaldi by I Musici di Roma, and even a night of Indian music with Sitarist Debabrata Chaudhury and Tabla Virtuoso Sitaram. The highlight of the festival will take place on Sept. 17, when the Orchestre de la Radio Suisse Italienne will present a concert of Mozart and Haydn atop 10,000-ft.-high Diablerets Glacier.

LUCERNE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL (Aug. 13-Sept. 7). Good music, beautifully performed by topnotch artists, has always been Lucerne's strength. This year, the conductors include George Szell, Herbert von Karajan, William Steinberg and Istvan Kertesz. Two husband-and-wife teams--Chris-ta Ludwig and Walter Berry, Jacqueline Du Pre and Daniel Barenboim--will be heard in joint recitals. Among other soloists: Flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, Pianist Geza Anda, Violinist Zino Francescatti, Cellist Pierre Fournier.

AIX-EN-PROVENCE (through July 31). The Orchestre de Paris, under the direction of Herbert von Karajan, Karl Miinchinger and others, will be in residence at this spa 17 miles north of Marseille. A wide spectrum of traditional and 20th century repertory will be offered in symphonic and chamber music programs. Also on the schedule is a series of musical films, including Beethoven's Ninth Symphony conducted by Von Karajan, A Homage to Edgar Varese, and a feature on avant-garde Composers Karlheinz Stockhausen and Olivier Messiaen.

VERONA (through Aug. 17). Italy's oldest summer opera, now in its 47th year, offers Turandot, Aida and Don Carlo in an acoustically perfect Roman amphitheater. Tenors Carlo Bergonzi and Placido Domingo, Sopranos Birgit Nilsson and Montserrat Caballe highlight the excellent casts.

SALZBURG (July 26-Aug. 30) will not disappoint those who like the tried and true, though there will also be productions of some rarely heard operas. Emilio de' Cavalieri's The Representation of Body and Soul (1600), Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La Serva Padrona (1733), and Mozart's Bastien und Bastienne spell Von Karajan's controversial production of Don Giovanni, and Beethoven's Fidelio under Karl Boehm's baton. The classics--heavy on Mozart, of course--will be given their due by the Vienna Philharmonic.

DUBROVNIK (through Aug. 25). The rugged scenic beauty of this Yugoslav seaport offers a feast for the eye while the ear attunes to the sounds of the Amadeus Quartet and the Zagreb Philharmonic. A glittering array of artists, including Soprano Martina Arroyo, Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, Violinist Isaac Stern, and Pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Alexis Weissenberg will all be on hand.

CINEMA

THE WILD BUNCH. The script is only another chapter in the legend of the West. But Sam Peckinpah's direction places him with the best of the newer generation of American film makers and makes the film a raucous and extremely violent classic of its genre.

THE DEVIL BY THE TAIL. Yves Montand comes on as a sardonic, Gallic Bogart in this lively little French farce directed with wry mockery by Philippe de Broca.

TRUE GRIT is a creaky Western comedy that features a lot of painful cracker-barrel dialogue and a superb, self-mocking performance by John Wayne, who at 62 has never seemed more like The Duke.

THE FOOL KILLER and THE BOYS OF PAUL STREET. In The Fool Killer, a runaway twelve-year-old orphan comes to the beginning of maturity through a series of picaresque adventures. The call to action in The Boys of Paul Street is a dispute over the last vacant lot in town. Both films are tragicomedies that are focused on --and for--youth.

GOODBYE, COLUMBUS. Director Larry Peerce has produced some rare moments of social criticism in this film, but he frequently slips into burlesque. Nevertheless, Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw save the show with skillful performances.

MIDNIGHT COWBOY. A Texas drifter and a Bronx loner provide the nucleus of an unusually moving picture about love among the loveless. John Schlesinger (Darling) directs Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman with a restraint that is often missing from the script.

LAUGHTER IN THE DARK. Anna Karina (an usherette) is the taunting, haunting object pursued by Nicol Williamson (a wealthy blind Englishman). The script was carefully adapted from Nabokov's exploration of jet-black humor.

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

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 an unarmed black boy shot by a white New York City policeman. The result evokes the tragedy of a sleepwalking American 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.

WHAT I'M GOING TO DO, I THINK, by L. Woiwode. A young couple expecting a baby embark on a honeymoon in the Michigan woods and discover terror in paradise. A remarkable first novel.

THE ECONOMY OF CITIES, by Jane Jacobs. With a love of cities that overshadows mere statistics, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities explores the financial aspects of growth and decay in urban centers.

THE RUINED MAP, by Kobo Abe. In this psychological whodunit by one of Japan's best novelists (The Woman in the Dunes, The Face of Another), a detective turns a search for a missing husband into a metaphysical quest for his own identity.

ADA, by Vladimir Nabokov. A long, lyric fairy tale about time, memory and the 83-year-long love affair of a half sister and half brother by the finest living writer of English fiction.

Best Sellers

FICTION

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

2. Portnoy's Complaint, Roth (2)

3. The Godfather, Puzo (4)

4. Ada, Nabokov (3)

5. The Andromeda Strain, Crichton (7)

6. The Pretenders, Davis

7. Except for Me and Thee, West (6)

8. Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut (5)

9. The Goodbye Look, Macdonald (8)

10. The Vines of Yarrabee, Eden

NONFICTION

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

2. The Kingdom and the Power, Talese (3)

3. Ernest Hemingway, Baker (2)

4. Jennie, Martin (4)

5. Between Parent and Teenager, Ginott (5)

6. An Unfinished Woman, Hellman (7)

7. The 900 Days, Salisbury (6)

8. The Money Game, 'Adam Smith' (9)

9. Robert Kennedy: A Memoir, Newfield (8)

10. A Long Row of Candles, Sulzberger

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