Redwood City’s Fuse Theatre and Dragon Theatre this year had intended to expand on the one-act festival they co-produced last summer.

“Over the next few years, our plan was to build a festival that could serve as a platform for artists—particularly artists from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds,” Fuse’s artistic director Stacey Ardelean says. “COVID-19 made it pretty clear that couldn’t happen, so we had to pivot quickly to everything online.”

Now the two companies plan a slew of streaming videos, conversations, short plays (under 20 minutes), peer panel discussions and more all centered around racism and in support of Black, indigenous and other people of color and queer artists. They’re calling the 2020 Redwood Play Festival program “COEXIST: Stories of Unlikely Connection.”

“When the Black Lives Matter protests ramped up in earnest, we realized we had a great opportunity to provide all of these groups with a bigger virtual platform for their many more unheard stories,” Ardelean explains.

The program kicked off July 15 with an informal happy hour chat with two festival writers, Emma Attwood and Nick Malakhow, beginning at 6:30 p.m. on www.twitch.tv/dragontheatre  On July 17, Malakhow will read his short play “Grit,” which focuses on two scholarship students at Dunston-Hall Academy, a fictional New England boarding school.  Register for this Zoom production at www.fusetheatre.org.

On July 18, a peer panel will discuss the world according to queer artists of color at 5 p.m. On July 20, a reading of the new play “Lady and the Unicorn” by Emma Atwood begins at 6 p.m., followed by a workshop discussion with the playwright. A short-play clinic hosted by director Peet Cocke starts at 6:30 p.m. A second reading of “Lady and the Unicorn” starts at 6 p.m. on July 22.

All of these will be available online at www.crowdcast.io/dragontheatre.

“We put out a call for submission of new, unproduced short plays and got a ton of submissions,” says Kim Wadycki, Dragon Theatre’s managing director.  Now that everything is done online, she says there’s no need to “cram everything into one weekend, so we can help artists really workshop and develop new works.”

The short-play clinics are programs intended to explore the themes of the interconnected nature of social categories and cross-cultural connections, she adds. “Our intention is to continue producing these clinics through the end of 2020 at about the rate of one per month.”

Other events and programs also are planned in the coming months. “We’re working on a panel with transgender athletes, but there’s been a lot of schedule wrangling and date slippage from the presenters. As a consequence, I can only talk in vague terms. With all the uncertainties right now, it’s a little like herding drunk cats with Attention Deficit Disorder,” she says.

Also planned are Rotating Peer Panels, where artists curate panels of recorded conversations of peer groups. Ardelean says they’ll be available to watch “as a way of providing underrepresented groups a story platform.” She says they’ll also be setting up a “Play Studio” so that audiences can interact with Fuse and Dragon theater companies for upcoming projects.

More information is available at www.fusetheatre.org and www.dragonproductions.net.