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Jonathan Yardley [Style, Sept. 14] admonishes university presses to \"be scholars first and publishers second,\" criticizes those that publish books the average Jack or Jill might buy and laments the general decline of what he chooses to call \"standards.\" Since one of the books identified as exemplary of this lamentable state of affairs has just been published by the press I direct, I would like to reply.

We do not know what made Oskar Schindler, of \"Schindler's List,\" be so overtly opportunistic and hedonistic, and finally heroic. The core of his righteous motivation remains unknown. But we know what \"let\" him be. Anyone who's paid attention to sex roles in the Third Reich knows that there was one birthright almost as important to the Nazis as being \"Aryan.\" That was being a man. Better still was to be a \"man's man,\" a macho man. And, as interpreted by the person of Liam Neeson, Oskar Schindler was certainly all that. What other German than a man's man could have accomplished what Schindler did? A man named Fritz Graebe saved hundreds of Jewish lives, too, also with bravado and ruses. Holocaust literature may well name others. But what German woman could have amassed such power to command unter-Nazis to do her bidding? Or had such chutzpah, so to speak, to use it? All such acts were verboten, of course, but none more so than the act of Frau Erna Dubnack, a person as outwardly unlike Oskar Schindler as one might imagine. She always has lived, and lives, a most circumspect existence, from delivering newspapers in predawn winters as a child to cleaning houses in her sixties.

It cultivates its prosperous image with the help of top-flight public relations firms, but the prosperity is enjoyed by a small minority buoyed by short-term capital inflows.The poverty of the majority provides a fragile foundation for an economy attempting to compete globally and threatens long-term economic stability and growth. Attempts to reform the economy over the past 40 years have failed because, instead of alleviating misery, they have increased the proportion that is poor. The generals who deposed him in 1955 had an opportunity to launch Argentina into the world economy, building on the larger domestic market and improved health care and education. Instead, the 1955 coup sought revenge against labor and, by 1958, had pushed labor's share back to the 1945 level.Successive governments continued the redistribution. By 1960, labor's share was less than 36 percent of national income. During the military regime of 1976-1983 and in the years since President Carlos Saul Menem took office in 1989, purchasing power has continued to shrink for the majority.

LEAD: ''When I was a kid,'' the Balinese shadow puppeteer I Nyoman Sumandhi says, ''I loved to play with puppets - but not real ones, just a special kind of leaf. My father and my grandfather didn't let me play with their puppets, because we call the puppet a kind of sacred thing.'' The clowns are more than cut-ups and translators. In both Bali and Java, the heroes' oafish chief servant is secretly wiser and stronger than even the most refined gods on the screen. Mr. [Sumarsam] explains: ''Many people in Java believe that the servant Semar is actually one of the older gods. We have the philosophy that the ultimate goal in life is a merging of the highest and the lowest. Semar descends onto the earth because he represents the highest.'' Similarly, Mr. Sumarsam says, a standard Javanese scene, the ''flower battle'' between a prince and giants, is not only a technical high point but a spiritual lesson: ''The prince just moves his hands a little bit, but the giants have to go really crazy. The idea of refinement is here. You stay still, but just by one movement of the hand, you can defeat the giants.'' The tempo of a shadow play differs from Java to Bali. ''The Javanese like everything to be kind of slow,'' Mr. Sumarsam says. Partly because they take it slow, Javanese shadow plays last all night - from about 9 P.M. till dawn. Viewers may nod off, dream and awaken, living in the world of the shadows. Most wayang kulit in Bali starts after sundown and last three or four hours. (In New York, Mr. Sumandhi's Balinese performance will run about two hours, Mr. Sumarsam's Javanese show about four.) The two shadow theater performances, are part of an unusually rich sampling of Indonesian performing arts in New York this season. On May 21, Sal Muirgiyanto and Endang Nrangwesti will present classical Javanese dance from the court of Surakarta at the Triplex Theater in Tribeca. Two of the country's most prominent experimental artists can also be seen in the coming weeks: the Balinese playwright and director Putu Wijaya will present ''Tai'' at La Mama starting March 31, and in late June, W. S. Rendra, Indonesia's controversial poet and playwright, will bring his company to Arts at St. Ann's in Brooklyn Heights.

The splashing together of diverse cultures has been a hallmark of 20th-century Western experimental arts. But mere trans-hemispheric cross-currents wax timid alongside the new global bug extravaganza. The show's air of car-chase eclecticism is characteristically [Lee Breuer] - as are its careens between weighty and glib. But nothing in the 51-year-old writer-director's previous work with the Mabou Mines company attempts the wild sweep of ''Ant.'' Even the last Breuer-[Bob Telson] collaboration, ''The Gospel at Colonus,'' melding the ancient Greek tragedy of Oedipus with a gospel service, seems restrained compared with their new leap across cultures and eras. Besides the centuries-old Japanese Bunraku at the center of ''The Warrior Ant,'' the cast includes Chinese glove puppets, a green Muppet-like worm with a Peter Lorre face, a computer-generated screen image of a little professorial ant, and live belly dancers. Its music ranges from a Trinidad-style steel band and Mr. Telson's Latin- and African-flavored ''world beat'' ensemble, Little Village, to Moroccan Gnawa invocations, ''all put together,'' the 39-year-old composer says, ''with a certain filter of American popular sensibility.'' Mr. Breuer's text also scoots across time and time zones, modeled, he says, after the Chinese antic classic, ''Journey to the West,'' Virgil's ''Aeneid,'' Dante's ''Inferno,'' Beckett's ''Lost Ones'' and ''Don Quixote.''

Mr. Mee characterizes ''The Imperialists at the Club Cave Canem'' as a ''a satyr play'' - like the comic afterpieces that followed Greek tragedies. In this case, it's meant to cap his not-yet-staged trilogy of more patently ferocious political works - all of them wildly nonrealistic. ''The War to End War'' explores how the United States launched itself into an international role at the end of World War I. ''The Investigation of the Murder in El Salvador'' (scheduled for a full-scale production next season by the New York Theater Workshop) concerns, in Mr. Mee's words, ''the nose dive of that 'international' role'' as seen in the United States involvement in Central America. And ''The Constitutional Convention, The Sequel'' presents disengaged, post-modernoid characters discussing pointless rules for living - evidence of ''the consequences, the chaos produced by that policy.'' After a few unsuccessful productions, he quit to concentrate on editing and political writing. ''I got real involved in the anti-war movement in the 60's and started a national committee to impeach Nixon in the 70's. I found myself obsessed with political arguments.'' His first major book, ''Meeting at Potsdam,'' presented the World War II ''peace'' conference a triumph of bellicose self-interest that launched the cold war. To his ''utter, dumbfounded amazement,'' he says, ''Potsdam'' was a popular success: the Literary Guild featured it as a selection, and it spawned a television movie. This informal rehearsal process allowed the little group to explore what turned out to be a more difficult script than they'd realized. ''We found that the choices needed to be extreme,'' Ms. [Kathleen Tolan] explains. ''These characters needed to be really wigged out. They could barely get their brain around a sentence.'' But the work alsohad to be ''rooted in some kind of human psychological logic, because if it wasn't, it would just be a caricature.'' A proud father as well as satisfied playwright, Mr. Mee says it was ''really wonderful'' working with his daughter. ''We thoroughly communicate with each other and can get to stuff real quickly. I totally trust her.'' But, he says, it may not have been quite so easy for her. ''You know, fathers keep telling their daughters what to do all the time. So she had to give me a swift jab in the ribs every now and again to get me to back off - which she did very gracefully.'' In fact, Ms. Mee says her father gave her totally free rein as a director and never interfered.

Dance dominates both vocabulary and subject of ''Largely/New York.'' In fact, the show was commissioned as part of the City Center series of ''New Contemporary Masters,'' which also includes the Laura Dean Dancers and Musicians and Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane and Company. Mr. [Bill Irwin] finds this framework not only flattering and challenging but a ready-made comic setup. ''You walk out on the stage in a dance context,'' he says, ''and there are certain givens. So, you can make fun of them.'' For Mr. Irwin, whose work always spotlights performers' skills, ''Largely/New York'' is an unusual foray into high-tech staging. A live video camera and monitor serve as major, often antic, props. B.I. and the other characters scramble to make videos and to watch themselves on the screen. ''When our grandparents were children,'' Mr. Irwin says, ''if you wanted to be an artist, you went to a store and bought a pencil and some paper. All the equipment around now makes it easier to get sidetracked instead of sitting down and wrestling with what you really want to say.'' Beyond this, video ''takes the human tendency toward self-absorption and projects it light-years forward.'' Mr. Irwin considers himself first of all an actor and welcomes the chance to expand into new performing territory by working in other people's productions. He recently created the lead in Bertolt Brecht's political comedy ''A Man's a Man'' at the La Jolla Playhouse in California and appeared on Broadway in Dario Fo's ''Accidental Death of an Anarchist.'' Last fall, he created a character he describes as ''a hard-boiled, arrogant jock -not a nice guy'' for a John Sayles film, ''Eight Men Out,'' to be released this summer. ''I know it's a really familiar thing that performers do,'' he says, ''but I find myself thinking, 'I'm doing B.I., but this is only one part of what I can do. I can also play Hamlet.' I actually do feel that way. I would love to do 'Hamlet.' ''

In his memoirs, Mr. [Akira Kurosawa] let on how he reassured his perplexed assistants during the shooting that the film had a point. And his emphasis, again, differed from those of his American adapters. ''Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves,'' he explained. ''Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from his birth; it is the most difficult to redeem.'' Mr. Kurosawa wrote that he had tried in ''Rashomon'' to show ''the pathetic self-delusions of the ego'' - how ''the human animal suffers from the trait of instinctive self-aggrandizement.'' The crux of the ''Rashomon'' story is the characters' disagreement about what happened. How about the creators of the three ''Rashomons''? Do they concur about what went on in the woods? Did the bandit rape the samurai's wife, as she says? Or was she compliant, even eager, as the bandit and her husband (through a spirit medium) maintain? Was the samurai killed in a fair fight, or was he stabbed to death by his distraught wife? Or was it suicide? In directing the show, Mr. [Robert Kalfin] has cast his lot - as the wig maker does - with the fourth, final account, which paints the wife as prodding two reluctant champions into a sloppy, clumsy bout for her hand. ''I agree that the version closest to the truth is the last one, the poor woodcutter's,'' Mr. Kalfin says, ''because it has the smell of truth.'' The playwrights don't buy that. Ms. [Fay Kanin] says, ''I would not say that one version is true and the others are false. I would say that all together they are probably the truth. Each of them has some aspect of the truth in it.'' Meanwhile, Mr. Kurosawa has left his opinion on this matter, like the film itself, a mystery. The Kanins faced a cultural gap in their adaptation. Mr. Kurosawa was a Japanese looking to the West and incorporating elements of that sensibility into a traditional Japanese setting. The music in ''Rashomon'' was, at his request, similar to Ravel's ''Bolero.'' The cinematography and acting technique reflected his admiration of silent movies. The Kanins tried to keep the original flavor of the film - ''to be as true to its origins as we could make it,'' says Ms. Kanin. But for them, keeping the original flavor meant making it self-consciously Asian, out-Japanesing Mr. Kurosawa. For example, together with the director of the Broadway production, Peter Glenville, they emphasized the exoticism of their ''Rashomon'' world with the sound of gongs and what one reviewer called ''cymbal and cling-clang incidental music.''

''[Tamara]'' is about responses to uncertainty, to the loss of control. ''John and I keep referring to [ the psychologist ] Wilhelm Reich,'' Mr. [Richard Rose] says, ''to people discovering their own impotence and trying to find power in the face of it.'' Following various characters, he explains, spectators ''see the same themes from different points of view in the society.'' Upstairs, Mr. [John Krizanc] quips, ''it's all art and madness'' while the servants downstairs have more directly political concerns. But he quickly corrects this overly schematic description: After all, one aristocrat in the play ''doesn't go mad and has a heavy political thing,'' and another upstairs character ''has a religious dilemma.'' Moreover, ''as the valet says in the play, servants don't just serve, but also service their masters, so there are a lot of cross-connections.'' Even after several viewings a spectator will not know all the strands of ''Tamara.'' (At productions in Toronto and Los Angeles, about 20 percent of the show's business have been returnees.) But, Mr. Krizanc says, ''you can follow anyone and have a sense of a complete story. On a proscenium stage, you can explore your protagonist in depth, but there will always have to be secondary characters. Here, each actor is the star of his own story.'' Directing several interlocking stories at once has its complications. Mr. Rose describes various ''traveling techniques'' he uses to keep viewers from getting lost during the movement between rooms and to hold their attention while their fellow spectators are catching up. For example, ''before turning a corner, a character stops and says something or turns to the audience. When you turn a corner you can really lose them.'' Sometimes the audience has all it can do just to keep pace. ''Mario [ the chauffeur ] has the longest cross,'' Mr. Krizanc says. ''He goes from Tamara's bedroom to Finzi's office, which is 25 feet or something, then upstairs to D'[Annunzio]'s bedroom - the stairs are a killer, especially when you're running, and he's always running - then he goes all the way down three flights of stairs to his bedroom in the servants' quarters, and then he goes right into the kitchen, which is the farthest point from his bedroom on the servants' floor. In fact, Mr. Krizanc has written three other plays, all touching on questions of politics and perception. His most recent, ''Prague,'' which Mr. Rose directed in Toronto in 1984 and in Montreal last year, addresses some of the same issues as ''Tamara.'' ''It deals again with artists and society, set in this case in a Communist country. It also deals with ways of seeing - that there isn't one way to see the world.'' But ''Prague'' is a one-track, nonenvironmental piece. Working within a more conventional structure, Mr. Krizanc says, was partly his way of rebounding from ''Tamara,'' whose unusual form has sometimes overshadowed the very content it was meant to underscore: ''I've had to acknowledge that a lot of people are there just to have a good time running around the house. So much of the press is saying, 'Follow Alexis Carrington up to her bedroom' - it's like 'Dynasty.' It was never our intention that the play would be about those kinds of things. We did it very seriously.''