By Jackie Demaline
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Cincinnati's Joe Sofranko performed a monologue from Hamlet to win the National Shakespeare Competition in New York on Monday.

More than 16,000 high school students nationwide have spent the last few months competing at the local and regional levels to advance to the finals, timed to coincide with Shakespeare's April birth date.

Sofranko, a junior at Walnut Hills High School, is the first national winner from Cincinnati, which has participated in the national contest for 18 years. The competition, held annually by the English-Speaking Union of the United States, began in 1983.

"I'm totally in shock," Sofranko reported happily from a terminal at Newark's airport, where he was waiting to board a flight home Tuesday. "I thought it would be really cool to get into the finals."

Sofranko's acting coach, Gina Cerimele-Mechley, was cheering him on at the finals. She says that what gives Sofranko an edge, beyond talent, is that "he's willing to work his butt off for hundreds of hours, analyzing an entire text, analyzing every word, understanding the punctuation, applying his movement training and taking the space. He does that."

Sofranko, a past Overtures Award winner locally and a veteran of The Lord of the Rings trilogy presented by Ovation and then Clear Stage at the Aronoff Center, will spend the summer enjoying the competition's first prize - four weeks studying at the prestigious British Academy of Dramatic Arts in London.

The first thing Sofranko did upon returning home yesterday was audition for Clear Stage's fall production of Romeo and Juliet, being directed by Cerimele-Mechley.

With university auditions also set for autumn, actor and director/coach both agree he may not be available. "He's auditioning for the experience," says Cerimele-Mechley. "I've already told him, 'We're not done. We're taking this (win) and going forward.' "

More than 200,000 students have participated in the Shakespeare competition since it began. It's one of several projects - including scholarships, exchange programs, lectures and seminars - sponsored by the English-Speaking Union, which was founded in 1920 and has more than 76 chapters across the country.

E-mail jdemaline@enquirer.com