by ⭐⭐⭐½
Actress Anna Akana has more than 2.8 million YouTube subscribers (and an additional 1.5 million combined followers on TikTok and Instagram), and her first big wave of fans found her in 2013 when she posted a viral video titled, “please don’t kill yourself.”
That’s when Akana first told the world about her younger sister, who committed suicide at the age of 13 in 2007, when Anna was 17. Her first Fringe show, now some 17 years later, returns to the idea of how when she talks about the darkest, most troubling topics, doing so can help preventing others from losing themselves to the darkness. But how can she make this all about her, and even better, get a Netflix deal out of it? She jokes about learning how to convert from traumatized to monetized, and even explicitly says Netflix and other streamers are coming to check out this show. And when she talks about quitting stand-up comedy in 2018 because a male stalker threatened to kill her, and that the LAPD was no help, she reflects with a quip: “It’s very Baby Reindeer of me.”
Her real-life stalker indeed sounded dangerous, and presented a clear danger to her, but the stakes never seem as dire in her retelling. Similarly, Akana describes her dad impulsively going off on a side quest that seemed like a suicide mission in itself, volunteering to fight for Ukraine against the Russian invasion. Throughout Akana is quick with jokes to deflect and diffuse, and you certainly don’t need a psych degree or therapist’s license to empathize with how corny wordplay dad jokes, as well as cracks about her dad or her Filipino mom, might be here way of maintaining emotional distance from her own dark past. Sometimes it comes off as too flippant, though. Why have any of these things happened to her family members or to her? It’s OK if she doesn’t have all the answers, but it’d land a lot more with the audience if we felt more involved. I suppose that’s not as much of an issue for fans of her online videos, because they already come to see her IRL having felt a parasocial connection to her.
The question, then, becomes how does Akana reach the people who don’t already feel like they know her? Home videos with her family and of her late sister humanize the stories at the end of the show, but she’d do well to paint a fuller picture of them in her preceding hour. No matter how dark it might get.
Anna Akana “It Gets Darker” plays at Pleasance Courtyard during the 2024 Edinburgh Fringe
