Natasha Rothwell’s life would be unrecognizable, compared to what we know of her today, if she hadn’t stopped still at a crossroads and changed her chosen path to the one that led her to create, produce and star in “How to Die Alone.” The proverbial fork in the road was located centerstage at Ithaca College, where she majored in journalism.

Rothwell made that choice out of practicality, she told me. “I had created, I think, some after-school special type drama in my head that my parents would be disappointed if I majored in theater,” Rothwell remembered during our recent conversation over Zoom. “Never did they ever have a conversation with me about it, but I had just taken into account the sacrifices they made for me, and it was going to be a massive swing, and with no guarantee.”

This ignored that she chose Ithaca for its respected theater program. But two events made her pivot inevitable. One was that she did a production of Ntozake Shange’s groundbreaking choreopoem “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf,” which reawakened the pull theater had on her spirit.

The other had a more potent pull because she was in the audience, watching her former castmates perform “House of the Blue Leaves.”

“I'll never forget it, watching those girls who I’d just done ‘For Colored Girls’ with, but they're continuing on with their acting program, so they're in this production, and I'm not,” she said.

Then she opened the playbill to find Langston Hughes’ “Harlem (A Dream Deferred)” displayed inside, with its plaintive opening lines:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

“Before the curtain even rose for the production, I sobbed,” she said. “And I remember going back to my dorm that night and making the decision that, ‘I don't want to be watching theater. I want to be doing it.’”

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