The saga of Concord, Virginia began in March 2006, when Neofotis performed one of his prose short stories from memory at an “over the transom” night at Greenwich Village’s Cornelia Street Cafe. He was immediately asked by the cafe to do a full one man show, and downtown NYC impresario Earl Dax booked him in famed east village artist saloon Dixon Place for its HOT! Festival. Thanks to to the faithful attendance of "Concordians," his show has been a continuous feature at Dixon Place since then, bringing forth new tales from his mythical small southern town. Dubbed the “seeming love child of Truman Capote and Eudora Welty” (NYC’s Next Magazine) a compilation of Neofotis’s scripts won the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Prize for Best Novella in 2008, and this summer is being published by St. Martin’s Press as a book - Concord, Virginia: A Southern Town in Eleven Stories (St. Martin’s Press; July 7th, 2009; $19.95). Most recently, it was honored as a runner-up finalist for the 2010 William Saroyon International Prize for Fiction given by Stanford University.

Concord, Virginia is the story of a town told through the history of its characters. For the show, Peter Neofotis presents his short stories, all of which have been performed in NYC’s laboratory theater Dixon Place, from memory. The tales include that of a hunter who, after accidentally killing his wife, finds hundreds of vultures in his yard; an albino woman who hears the ghosts of America’s past in the songs of birds; a gay botanist put on trial for love of flowers; and an old moonshiner who ruthlessly defends her river property from developers. In the tales, community and filial bonds come to odds with taboos, religion, and human laws – and the characters must choose by which system of ethics they will live.  

Neofotis developed the tales by night, while working by day at the NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies, where he was a Contributing Author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. He also co-authored a landmark article on observed climate change impacts that was published in Nature.