Playing War   

A show, inspired by coverage of the war in Afghanistan, satirizes television news.

While America is at war, perky, patriotic anchors at a 24-hour cable news station fawn over government officials and military analysts. A country singer's pro-war song climbs the charts. And the secretary of defense, in a televised announcement, suspends the Constitution.

This is the not entirely unfamiliar world of "A New War," a play by Gip Hoppe satirizing 24-hour news networks' reporting on international conflicts. Coverage of the war in Afghanistan inspired the play, which ran through mid-April at a theater near Boston. But when America began dropping real bombs on Iraq, Hoppe's fictional war, waged for "some reason" against enemies who wear "funny clothes" and eat "slimy, unimaginable things" seemed eerily prescient.

"It's extremely surreal," Hoppe says. "I had a lot of people tell me that they couldn't watch CNN quite the same way after seeing the play."

The 80-minute show unfolds on the set of the Atlanta-based "Cable News Channel," where two anchors package the "brand-spanking, shiny new war" as a fast-breaking top story, even though they don't know where it is, who's fighting or who started it. They interview a parade of people who know even less, including a military analyst, a TV star, a style guru and a "person on the street"--a Midwestern mom who says something like, "I don't know why they hate us. Everyone knows after we bomb them, they're much better off."

In another dead-on gag, the anchors switch often to a totally dark image of the U.S. bombers' mystery target, not unlike real news' ubiquitous night-vision pictures of Baghdad.

Live feed from Kabul in the post-9/11 war against terrorism inspired Hoppe's comic riff. "They just showed this thing endlessly with nothing happening," he says. "In the play, we just sort of take that to a very extreme, ridiculous place."

The play's title refers to the gung-ho labels that networks plaster over their war coverage, including CNN's headline for the war in Afghanistan: "America's New War." Hoppe feels that the networks took a tragic event and sold it as a "new and improved" product. "The packaging of the war coverage had crossed the line," he says. "It's not dissimilar to coverage of the Super Bowl, in many ways.... It all looks sort of easy and fun."

"A New War" spoofs stock elements of news coverage. There are the anchors' shellacked hairstyles. There's the style consultant with tips on how to make watching war coverage more enjoyable. And there's the talk show--"Crosshairs"--where pundits from the far-right and the moderate-right shout at each other over who's more folksy and plainspoken.

"I'm nostalgic for a more elegant form of journalism that I think is long gone," Hoppe says. But he doesn't expect his play to change anything. "I don't have any delusions about it. I just wanted to have a few laughs, and I wanted to express some things that were on my mind."