The Hang-Up

Coburg, 2018. Fifty-three-year-old Mario Cutza lives with his demanding Italian mother and struggles with grief, loneliness and an intense desire to be loved. After dating sites and awkward attempts to meet women fail, Mario opens his old address book and telephones women he believed were his girlfriends thirty years earlier. Each increasingly uncomfortable conversation reveals a different version of their shared past before ending with the inevitable hang-up. Funny, confronting and unexpectedly tender, The Hang-Up is a comedy-drama about isolation, family, memory and one socially awkward man’s desperate search for companionship and happiness.

The Hang-Up explores loss, loneliness, family dependence and the search for love and companionship. It examines social isolation, rejection, nostalgia, emotional vulnerability and the difficulties of forming relationships later in life. Through Mario’s innocent but frequently misguided attempts to reconnect with women from his past, the play considers the distance between romantic memory and present-day reality. Beneath its comedy is a compassionate portrait of a lonely man seeking acceptance, independence and human connection.

A contemporary comedy-drama constructed through numbered telephone-call scenes, family encounters, memories and unsuccessful romantic meetings. Mario Cutza’s repeated calls to women he knew approximately thirty years earlier provide the play’s central dramatic device. Each conversation reveals part of Mario’s past before ending in another abrupt “hang-up.” These calls are intercut with scenes involving his mother, brother and attempts to find companionship through dating sites, the local library, a restaurant and his Brown Bear mascot job. The production concludes with the ensemble singing and dancing to “That’s Amore” during the curtain call.

The Hang-Up is set in Australia in 2018. Its domestic and suburban locations include Mario’s family home, the local IGA, a library, a restaurant on Sydney Road and a vacuum company where Mario works as the Brown Bear mascot. The play reflects late-2010s concerns about social isolation, online dating, family dependence and the struggle to establish meaningful relationships in a digitally connected society. Its Italian-Australian family setting also explores intergenerational expectations, parental control and the continuing influence of family and cultural identity upon adult life. The characters and central events are fictional. The play was first copyrighted by Marty MonStar in 2021.

Written by Marty MonStar in 2021 and revised in 2025, The Hang-Up was presented by Cracked Actors Theatre in Melbourne. The production used an intimate contemporary setting, ensemble performances and rapid transitions between Mario’s bedroom, telephone conversations, a Sydney Road café, the vacuum-cleaner business and the Northern Hospital. Supporting roles may be doubled to suit a smaller cast.

A simple domestic interior with basic furniture and practical props. Minimal scene changes, supported by straightforward lighting and sound cues.

Recommended for mature teenage and adult audiences.

Contains coarse language, family verbal abuse, sexual references, discussions of sex, adult magazines, kissing, topless dancing and recreational drug use involving hash brownies. The play also addresses depression, severe loneliness, social isolation, illness and emotional distress, with comic medical and blood imagery involving spiders.