Open-Theatre: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM-based Interactive Drama

Tianyang Xu, Hongqiu Wu, Weiqi Wu, Hai Zhao


Abstract
LLM-based Interactive Drama introduces a novel dialogue scenario in which the player immerses into a character and engages in a dramatic story by interacting with LLM agents. Despite the fact that this emerging area holds significant promise, it remains largely underexplored due to the lack of a well-designed playground to develop a complete drama. This makes a significant barrier for researchers to replicate, extend, and study such systems. Hence, we present Open-Theatre, the first open-source toolkit for experiencing and customizing LLM-based interactive drama. It refines prior work with an efficient multi-agent architecture and a hierarchical retrieval-based memory system, designed to enhance narrative coherence and realistic long-term behavior in complex interactions. In addition, we provide a highly configurable pipeline, making it easy for researchers to develop and optimize new approaches.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-demos.31
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Ivan Habernal, Peter Schulam, Jörg Tiedemann
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
453–460
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-demos.31/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianyang Xu, Hongqiu Wu, Weiqi Wu, and Hai Zhao. 2025. Open-Theatre: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM-based Interactive Drama. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, pages 453–460, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Open-Theatre: An Open-Source Toolkit for LLM-based Interactive Drama (Xu et al., EMNLP 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-demos.31.pdf