stage management in games

["ted" <orangeted@...>]

I would like to be able to write a script for my game to stage manage the
characters. Something like:

ogre = monster("Eric")

ogre:WalkTo(30, 40)

ogre:Say("HelloWorld")

The trouble is, with something like this the rest of my game will pause
until Eric's said his line. Is there a way each agent can call a script like
this, which will do a frame's worth of logic and then hand back control so
that everything else in the game can be updated too?

thanks for any help with this.