In 1989, coincidentally or not, on the occasion of the Three Kings Day, three students of the then Lithuanian State Conservatoire (now the Lithuanian National Academy of Performing Arts - LMTA) and their lecturer decided to take a step that was quite understandable in the times of perestroika - to set up a co-operative.
The quartet gives the cooperative a simple name - "Teatras". When you are the first one of its kind, independent, there is no better name. Only after a few years does it become clear that the audience can give it a better name: it's fascinating, or perhaps a little ironic, that this name too - Keistuoliai - was destined to become an almost generic word.
The Theatre of the Kęistuolių has become a home for more than just the people who started it in the poor Lithuanian household that was just beginning to be filled with independence, and who are still creating it with their hands today. On the periphery of the capital's theatre complex, in the skyscraper of Soviet industrial construction, it has stubbornly taken root and grown up completely free.
The Theatre of the Weird has become home to many creative and observant souls who are able to discover and read a common code of weirdness that defies ordinary language. For generations, a trip to the Press Palace - whether once a year or every morning - means a return home, for some to their childhood, for others to a safe place where they are not afraid of their strangeness, of not knowing whether they are always on the way to the ordinary and normal according to the rules that are not written down but are a little bit stifling. For still others - or rather, for four generations of actors and directors - it is a return to a creative home, to a circle of people that grows every few years, linked not only by the adrenaline of work and the pre-premiere, but also by a lively, sometimes painfully strong bond, by the craziest ideas, by the most touching lyrics, by the music, by the love of the stage, of each other, and of life with all its strangeness.
