As one of several Bay Area feminists who made their reputations in other genres but are now (or again) writing for the theater, Cherríe Moraga has expressed a desire to create plays that inspire a new vision while they challenge political correctness.

And in many respects her new work, Heroes and Saints, produced by Brava! For Women in the Arts at San Francisco's Mission Cultural Center, does just that. An unusual blend of realism, surrealism and political theater, it is written partly in English, partly in Spanish. Moraga sets the play in a San Joaquin Valley town where growers threaten to shoot farm-workers who are protesting pesticide-related deaths by hanging their dead children from the grapevines crucifixion-style. But rather than proceed by making a frontal attack on toxic sprays, Moraga chooses to emphasize the human drama of a Latina family suffering the effects of the poisons. One daughter. Yolanda, loses a baby to them (a performance by Jennifer Proctor that calls up excruciating depths of pain). Another, Cerezita (Jaime Lujan), herself suffering from a birth defect, is—in what could have been fierce poetry had it been realized less awkwardly—simply a head poised on a wheeled cart. The mother (Juanita Estrada), protecting this daughter, tries to keep her from the world. But following one of a number of extraordinarily powerful moments in Albert Takazauckas's production, this one a highly erotic love scene between the head and a sympathetic priest in which the young woman tries and fails to recover a sense of her body, Cerezita carries the corpse of her sister's baby to the fields and is shot.

Ultimately, it's clear that this is not only not agitprop but that the fight against pesticides is not even the central conflict. The real action of the play is the daughter's rebellion against the mother and what she stands for, which is framed as a social and political fight, not a psychological one. The mother is reactionary, a sexually and otherwise repressive, fatalistic figure who must be overthrown. And it's here that Heroes and Saints fails in its aspirations. When Moraga contrasts the mother with an older woman activist based on Dolores Huerta, we know we are seeing the acceptable role model. Moraga isn't able or doesn't wish to get inside the way the mother has internalized her oppression as she gets inside Cerezita's yearning or Yolanda's agony, although elsewhere she has written with compassion and intelligence about the difficulties of change.