Acting just comes naturally

[attach]6299[/attach]Acting is in Jaime Polatynski’s blood.

“My sisters and I would sit with my uncle at the piano at family gatherings and put on musical skits,” the Willowdale-based Polatynski says. “As a little girl, acting was always something I aspired to do, and was just natural for me.”

By the time she was around eight years old, Polatynski had already developed a taste for the limelight.

“People would always look forward to my presentations,” she says. “And I was always volunteered to speak first. I just enjoyed being in front of an audience. I knew from then that I had to do it, I had to act. It just felt right.”

Polatynski attributes much of this to her family as her two uncles were both performers and her father played in a high school band.

“The best part about acting is the confidence I feel and the challenge of connecting to the audience on a special level, I like helping people escape,” she says. “It’s about finding the truth of the character. That’s how people believe me, and that’s how you form that connection.”

Polatynski tends to aim towards the more comedic side of acting, and attributes this too to her family.

“Growing up, we liked to make each other laugh in my family. I inherited that,” she says with a laugh. “When I look into the eyes of someone I made laugh, and I see that look that says ‘thank you’, I feel the connection, and how could I not run with that?”

In early July Polatynski performed in a Fringe Festival production of Anton Chekhov’s The Bear, which played along with a presentation of Chekhov’s The Lady with a Lap Dog. In The Bear, Polatynski plays a widow trying to pay back her dead husband’s debts.

“I’m finding joy in playing with the part,” she says. “I like playing with the little characteristics and mannerisms that the director has given me the freedom to build.”

“I’m also a huge admirer of the classical text,” Polatynski says. “It speaks on a level from back then, and being part of it is like living in the moment and not restricting yourself. That’s a big part of acting, that lack of restriction that means anything can happen.”