Summary
Final Fantasy 14is the perfect environment for creative players to let loose and build something unexpected and exciting. Watching a fully-fledged theatre production in the game is something I encourage any player to check out, and there’s a new theatre troupe on the scene to make that even easier.
The Curtain Call Theater Company was formed at the beginning of 2023 with the aim of creating original productions, based on the lore and stories of FF14, that are fully voice-acted and workshopped in-house. The team also offers an education program where they teach classes periodically about stage management, in-game macro performing, voice performance, and more.
Curtain Call wants to share its best practices with novices to encourage the community to flourish and try theatre themselves. The team also communicates with other in-game theatre companies, such as Namafel, Firebird Theater, Cirque, and Esprit, to grow a network of FF14 theatre makers.
“Our main goal with these productions is to expose a different audience to the magic of modern theatre,” Curtain Call Theater Companyartistic director and founder Chilitells me. “With this goal of producing new works in mind, we started a play workshop program that should be launching soon.
“We want Curtain Call to be a place where anyone can bring their new play, whether it’s based on the lore of the game or not. We want it to be a place where new plays can thrive for very little cost or effort since we can produce them virtually and do not need tangible resources to produce them. This effort is not to replace theatre or workshop programs with virtual options, but to open the door to others to see live shows that are outside of the general audience’s minds, starting with our original works and hopefully expanding to others.”
The team is working hard on their first production, House of Ice, which they’ll perform on December 16 and 17 at their Amon Theater on Dynamis, Maduin at Goblet W7 P43. Chili began conceptualising the show in January, finished his first draft in May, and is currently working on the final draft.
“It takes a while because we heavily workshop our plays, and I’m not an incredibly experienced writer yet, so I’m not as speedy as I’d like to be,” he tells me. “When I finished the first draft, we got a bunch of people on a call to read through the play and give feedback. I used this to write draft two, which I didn’t finish until July. This script is about 60 pages now, so it is a full-length show for some context. The writing process really is the thing we put the most time into because we want to put most of our emphasis on the quality of the stories we are producing.”
The team began casting in August and is currently finishing up the last of the recorded lines. They plan to use an audio program called QLAB for the lines, music, and ambience, then turn their script into a macro script to adapt the performance for an FF14 stage, “We take our macros in game and sync the QLAB soundscape with voice performances to the macros in a cueing format. Every button a macro performer presses to cue their written dialogue and emotes will also have a QLAB audio cue that I will press during the show. This will allow us to put everything together and create a fluid and immersive experience.”
A great deal of work is involved, so the team doesn’t plan to start rehearsals until the end of October as they need everything else set up and ready to go before then. As such, it’s understandable that the team only aims to host one major show a year, but they intend to produce smaller, lower-effort productions using their workshop program.
Creating theatre productions within the constraints of FF14 is no easy feat, as there are many limitations on what the team can do. There are only so many players you’re able to have in a house, and even then, the team limits their audience, as otherwise, it can cause character models to flicker in and out and ruin the show.
“You can only have two lighting fixtures hanging or placed at once,” Chili says. “Which makes it challenging, but I’m glad those pieces exist at all because they are vital to creating pretty on-stage pictures when directing. Other limitations include character movement. The character movement in FF14 isn’t always natural and is often very hyperbolic. So it’s hard to find a nice in-between when you want to create fluid and natural movement because you cannot typically move and emote at the same time.”
Chili has a great team on hand to help, withAhro’zi of Espritas the Curtain Call co-director and head of macro movement and technical direction, including the housing, costume design, and props. With over three years of experience in macro performance, Ahro’zi is the best equipped to help the team navigate the limitations and challenges of working within FF14. For example, if a character in a scene is holding a gun, but their costume is for a summoner only, that presents an issue.
The guest experience director, Tromad, handles everything outside of the venue, handling the queues, arranging entertainment for the waiting crowd, and managing the ushers. The stage manager, Sherb, keeps everything organised, taking notes for rehearsals and voice recordings and contributing to calling the shows, which is essentially conducting the technical elements. Crol is the costume designer who works tirelessly to find suitable glamours for all of the cast as well as factoring in how many characters each actor needs to play, whether their race has glamour restrictions, and which jobs they need to be.
Curtain Call Theater Company currently has two in-game theatres, The Amon Theater and The Syrcus Theater, with hopes of producing main stage shows in The Amon and their workshop smaller productions in The Syrcus simultaneously. You can find out more about the team and their work viatheir official website,Twitter, andDiscord, and be sure to check out House of Ice in December.
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