If you believe Shakespeare, certainty is elusive, ambition is dangerous, brutish nature overwhelms judgment and the madness of love keeps us from seeing the donkey ears our lovers wear.
And the world is both an oyster and a stage, which high school senior Raymond Pottebaum could experience as he heads to New York next month to represent Southern Arizona in the National Shakespeare Competition.
In all, some 600 students in the region participated in 22 school competitions feeding into the regional contest. Pottebaum took top honors among 32 peers.
The Buena High School student and native of Sierra Vista, however, could be the last local winner.
Organizers of the all-volunteer local event, a tradition for 24 years, are having such a hard time keeping it going that the gifts to participating students this year were T-shirts with a phrase from Hamlet: "The rest is silence."
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"We hope it's not prophetic," said Jerry Helm, 75, who along with a handful of other retired teachers makes up the Friends of Shakespeare, an offshoot of a national group, The English-Speaking Union, which sponsors the national competition.
Membership is dwindling, which is causing financial hardships, Helm said. Despite fundraisers, the group came up $500 short of the $2,000 it owes in dues to the national chapter.
Since there would be nothing sweet about the sorrow of parting with the competition, members are brainstorming ideas to make the organization viable, Helm said. "It's just a lot of fun. You really see the best, nicest kids. They're very enthusiastic. The teachers are great to work with. I would just hate to see this thing disappear."
Bobbi McKean, the outreach director for the School of Theatre Arts at the University of Arizona, said she found out about the group's financial problems in the fall. There are multiple reasons the competition is valuable, she said.
Shakespeare offers a counterweight to the world of "LOL" and "RU there" text messages, she said. "The art of communicating through language is threatened, I would say. It's something we don't do much of in our regular day-to-day communication, so to play with Shakespeare just really opens up a world for students to explore."
The playwright, harkening to an era when love resided in the liver, courage in the stomach and anger in the spleen, also exposes students to language that's grounded in the flesh, she said.
"We are more and more up in our heads," she said. "Shakespeare is one way we get in touch with language as it lives in the whole body. That's why we are attracted to Shakespeare and why we want to hear it and speak it."
Pottebaum, who has a 4.1 GPA and will head to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in the fall to major in electrical engineering, has a vise-grip handshake, says "farewell" instead of goodbye, sprinkles Shakespearean phrases liberally throughout his speech and has a voice with a rich timbre. A bit unassuming, he morphs into a riveting presence onstage.
He had the usual (read: boring) encounter with Shakespeare through "Romeo and Juliet" in freshman English.
During his sophomore year, he decided to compete, delivering a monologue from "Titus Andronicus." He didn't place, but a new appreciation bloomed for Shakespeare.
"That's when I found out how powerful he is, how the words roll off the tongue and how magnificent the language is," Pottebaum said.
He received honorable mention his junior year for his comedic take from "The Merry Wives of Windsor." This year, he came back with a part from Mark Antony's "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech from "Julius Caesar," pantomiming fingering the blood-soaked fabric of the shroud covering the emperor's body.
Cora Beckett, a freshman at Green Fields Country Day School, took second place, and Canyon Del Oro senior Robert Don Mower rounded out the winners.
The winner of the national competition will be awarded a full scholarship for a summer course at Oxford University in England.
Southern Arizona hasn't had a big winner in the history of its participation, coordinator Helms said.
Even though 42 Buena students participated in Buena's schoolwide competition that fed into the regional competition, Pottebaum's drama teacher, Carrie Duerk, said Shakespeare isn't initially an easy sell.
"Most of the ones who participate show up for the challenge," she said. "They're expecting difficult, heady, intellectual work and then they find that it's really just good acting material.
"Shakespeare has lasted as long as he has because he writes for actors."
Duerk herself participated in the competition in 1991. "Looking back, what I learned is that it's competition that makes you grow," she said.
Duerk said she hopes the community will step forward to help revive the competition.
"In public education, we're losing opportunities all around us — it's harder to find sponsors for festivals and workshops. It would be a real shame to lose an event in which the educational connections are so clear."
On StarNet: Watch Pottebaum's winning performance at go.azstarnet.com/localvideos
To learn more
DVDs of the full regional Shakespeare competition are being sold for $15 to raise money for Friends of Shakespeare. Call Buena High School at 1-520-515-2800 to reserve a copy.
