The Blue Mug at The Benaroya Hall

Memories - we seem to make them what we want them to make us seem. It is easy to be all tall and proper and revel in the warmth of old childhood joint-family memories, eating mangoes, picking heavy mattresses and carrying them through narrow staircases, but now living in a huge apartment with only one and a half persons.

The Blue Mug is a devised piece of theatre in which actors Rajat Kapoor, Sheeba Chadha, Munish Bhardwaj and Vinay Pathak go down the path of their personal memories - their childhood, adolescence and youth, and also immediate past in their middle age. The play depicts the larger canvas of Indian memory through monologues and improvised scenes between the actors.

The play also depicts a story of a patient from Punjab who travels to Mumbai with his family and then loses his memory. He tends to remember things only prior to his 20th birthday. He is now 40 years old. The doctor treating him then takes on to himself to unravel the beauty in his memory loss.

Echoing this are Ranvir Shorey and Konkona Sen Sharma who play a doctor and a patient of memory loss. They evaluate the journey of this patient whose journey from war-ridden Kashmir to Punjab to Mumbai is depicted in a very funny yet poignant manner.