CONEY ISLAND NURSERY RHYME

By Lubomir Rzepka

A Ring-Works Staged Reading

Coney Island Nursery Rhyme is an homage to an important and nearly forgotten part of history, a reflection on truth and trust, and more importantly, it is a meditation on what it means to “do the right thing” and how doing the right thing isn’t free of consequence. The play is set in Connecticut and New York in the 1930’s and follows the esteemed incubator-doctor showman and unofficial father of Neonatology, Martin A. Couney. In a time where the medical world refused to employ incubator technology, Martin A. Couney took it upon himself to save premature babies in his own incubators at a sideshow at Coney Island. The tale is historical fiction, an imagined plot in which this very real doctor is placed at the center.