THEATER REVIEW : Teatro Cometa Fizzles on Delivery : The group’s good intentions don’t capture the bright <i> acto </i> tradition of simple works with punchy messages.

Luis Valdez, founder of El Teatro Campesino and still the leading light of Chicano theater, keeps going.

Valdez, whose “Bandido!” comes to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles next year, has many good years left, but what about his artistic offspring who are following in the El Teatro tradition of activist, populist theater? How are they doing?

For the most part, they are struggling. Reviews of the recent Southland visit by El Teatro de la Esperanza weren’t even lukewarm, and the jury’s out on whether the Taper’s recent embrace of (mostly) Chicano artists and new plays will bear fruit.

Orange County’s own Campesino-inspired company, Teatro Cometa, could be celebrating its roots a whole lot more effectively than it is in a new coupling of new and old one-acts, “Zero Dollars Per Hour” and “Piece of the Pie.”

Both works adopt the acto form--simple tales, punchy scenes and punchier messages--that Valdez and company developed when they performed in the California vineyards of the 1960s. Both strive for comic speed and political breadth. Both want the oldest and youngest audience members to understand every moment.

And while writer-director Jaime Gomez manages the broad strokes of the acto --the deliberately stereotyped figures of good and evil, the ubiquitous presence of La Muerte , the polemical issues as fresh as the morning’s paper--he and his group are unable to make the form sing and dance with any real style and comic force. This is all intent and very little delivery.

Not that Gomez’s Cometa troupe doesn’t put across the messages. In both the brief opener, “Zero Dollars” (about exploited illegal immigrants) and the newer, longer “Piece of the Pie” (about community self-empowerment), the messages can’t help but be heard. The acto is a broadside by other means, the Brechtian school as practiced by poor theater artists with little means.

And this is the problem. While Cometa doesn’t hide and actually celebrates its identity as a poor theater, it hasn’t mastered the tradition it wants to express.

The jaunty “Zero Dollars,” for example, is driven more by the running corridos played by the supporting band of Tony Bushala, Ron Rodarte, Fred Salazar and Morris Evans than by the cast.

While Carmen Melendez and Yolanda Gomez work up some sympathy as immigrants used and abused as maids (and nearly everything else), the bad folks they must contend with before they’re saved by the good Union Representative (Gustavo Urrea) are just not that terrifying.

Besides, as an audience member noted at intermission, whatever happened to unions? The message of “Zero Dollars”--a good deal of it delivered in Spanish--is vital, but its prescription doesn’t seem to fly anymore.

“Piece of the Pie” is set on a much larger canvas: an entire barrio. Perhaps because it seems even more urgent than “Zero Dollars,” the company also seems to be more about its business.

That still doesn’t mean that it has its acto together. While the older Establishment folks (led by Jose Luis Gomez, Melendez as a snooty librarian and Rodarte as a teacher type modeled after S.I. (“English Only”) Hayakawa, complete with tam-o’-shanter) decide how to divvy up the community’s resources, the young rebels (Luis Guizar and Mike Vargas) question their priorities.

This could be a vital, and funny, cross-generational debate in which old and new styles (theatrical and otherwise) could vie for prominence. But besides continually sloppy pacing, habitual running-over of lines and a refusal to match the musical beat of the band, Gomez’s play spends more time trucking out notions that, for instance, Thomas Alva Edison was Latino-born than focusing on the conflict.

Teaching lessons to an audience through direct address is another acto element, but that should never grind the action to a halt as it does here. Or, as some old Soviet Marxist surely once said, freezing things in place is no way to carry on a movement.

* “Zero Dollars Per Hour” and “Piece of the Pie,” Teatro Cometa, 116 1/2 W. Wilshire Ave., Fullerton. Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m. $6. (714) 526-5156. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes. “Zero Dollars Per Hour”

Carmen Melendez: Amparo

Yolanda Gomez: Lupe

Fred Salazar: La Migra

Bobby Gomez: Vato Loco

Tina Valadez: Morena Clara

Mike Vargas: Bellboy

Ron Rodarte: Mr. Montoya

Jaime Gomez: Boss

Gustavo Urrea: Union Representative

“Piece of the Pie”

Jose Luis Gomez: Mr. Melendez

Jack Rubio: Mad Max

Bobby Gomez: Vincente/El Diablo

Luis Guizar: Chino

Mike Vargas: Lalo

Blanca Maldonado: Lola

Carmen Melendez: Librarian Ann

Lukie Ramos: Sylvia

Ron Rodarte: Mr. Hurtwig

Yolanda Gomez: La Muerte

A Teatro Cometa production of Jaime Gomez’s one-act plays. Directed by Gomez. Music by Tony Bushala, Ron Rodarte, Fred Salazar and Morris Evans.