Crowe’s first thoughts were that three members of her cast were at the school when the shooting began. A few more are parents or teachers of students there. How were they? Crowe’s instinct was, is, and always will be to protect those around her. 

“Yesterday, you wouldn’t think that anything could possibly affect these kids,” she said. “But this is obviously so traumatic for them. It sounds so ridiculous to even have to say this, but I think they are so brave for even walking into those buildings every day. It’s crazy to me that this is still happening.”

The 47th U.S school shooting this year awoke the Lioness in Crowe – literally. In 2007, Crowe was one of the first volunteers for the Lioness Program, which asked female Marines to conduct culturally sensitive weapons searches on women and children at security checkpoints in Iraq without violating local customs that prohibit men from physically interacting with women.

“Doing any kind of intel on women simply could not be done by our male military members,” said Crowe, “especially if we were trying to respect the culture while we were there.”

Up until then, female Marines were not allowed to participate in combat. At the time, that left Crowe as a bored communications specialist. So when the call came to be a Lioness, she said, “I was like, ‘Please. I am ready and willing. Let’s do this.’”

The Marines have a term for the line that Crowe was about to cross. “We would call it ‘going outside the wire,’” she said. “Our bases were spotty all throughout the Middle East, So, when you were on base, you were fine. But going outside the wire was dangerous. And they were now looking for females who were willing to go there.”

Crowe’s work included going to clinics and schools to meet up with local women and children, and help them with their needs. “You’re bringing things to them that they need, and you’re giving them educational materials,” she said. “It was a really good experience and I loved what I was doing.”

So much so that when Crowe got back to the States, she immediately re-upped as the newly renamed Female Engagement Team was being expanded into Afghanistan.

Broken Arrow beginnings

Crowe does not come from a traditional generational military family. She grew up as a proud Disney princess in Broken Arrow, Okla. She even hung a Disney princess calendar from her Middle Eastern bunk. Her jam is Belle – the self-sufficient, booksmart heroine of “Beauty and the Beast,” “although I have a very tight connection with Mulan as well,” she said of ”another warrior trying to make her family proud.”

Crowe began performing on local theater stages at just 5 years old, “so I was in it from the get-go,” she said. “A lot of my life, especially my teen years, were focused around musical theater. I also did a lot of sports, like soccer and martial arts.”

After a year studying musical theater at a New York conservatory, financial uncertainty led Crowe to sign up for the Marines, never having fired a weapon. “They said I had no bad habits,” she said with a laugh.

Thus began a five-year odyssey that sent Crowe all over the world. When her time ended in November 2011, she already was accepted to Cal-State Fullerton to again pursue musical theater, this time courtesy of the G.I. Bill. Along the way, she picked up a degree in sonography from Cypress College in nearby Long Beach, which is how she landed her present job as an ultrasound tech in West Denver. (She also pulls some on-call shifts for emergency rooms in Littleton and Lakewood.)

Crowe moved out to Colorado at the end of 2017, but the demanding hours of her various medical jobs were not conducive to returning to performing, even as a side interest. But by 2022, she made it a priority to somehow make it work. She quickly found herself cast in “Beauty and the Beast” for the Wesley Players in Highlands Ranch – not as her beloved Belle but rather as … a Napkin?!? She also appeared in “First Date” at the Louisville Center for the Arts and as Femina in “Man of La Mancha” for Ovation West, which, with “Annie Get Your Gun,” at long last, “has cast me in my first lead in many, many years,” she said.

Crowe, now 37, returned to her now split life in the theater, she said, because she had to. “It’s part of who I am,” she said. Crowe didn’t immediately equate performing as a way of processing the totality of her military experience. But it has made her feel whole again. And whatever makes us whole could be considered therapy.

“I did engage in combat over there. I was in multiple firefights,” said Crowe, who earned a combat action ribbon for her service, which is almost unheard of for female Marines. “But it happened, and it was just part of being there. It’s funny, tying this all back to Annie Oakley: We really did call (the Afghan drug battleground city of) Marjah the wild, Wild West of the Middle East, because you never knew what was going to happen there.”

When she finally got out of the military, Crowe said, “I was champing at the bit to do theater. I had put my life on hold, and I could not wait to kind of get back to me. You just feel like this whole other person in the military, and I was ready to jump back into my body, literally. I was very ready to get back and tell stories.”

Retired Air Force Colonel Michelle Ruehl can relate. Long before she took over the Academy’s vaunted cadet theater company called the Bluebards, and long before she, too, was deployed to Afghanistan, she wrote a doctoral dissertation focused on how theater can help individuals and communities heal from personal, social and historical trauma.

And after the events of the past two days, she said, we need live theater now more than ever.

“At times of personal or national tragedy, I can tell you that theater is the only place where people can gather and grieve and emote, and where that is not only appropriate, but accepted and necessary,” said Ruehl, who knows what Crowe gets out of performing in front of an audience, even without ever having met her.

Among other things, Ruehl said, “theater creates a space for community dialogue. Theater also gives trauma survivors a chance to connect with one another by deeply experiencing their common humanity.”

Put simply, she added, “theater gives us a modality, a ritual as old as time, to gather, make meaning out of trauma, connect through a common human experience, engage in difficult dialogue, give testimony, purge the pain, rehearse new ways of being after tragedy, and start a healing process.”

To quote the American spiritual teacher and philosopher Ram Dass, she added: “We’re all just walking each other home.”

Crowe has found common ground with fellow actor and fellow Marine Adam Driver, who has said that he found making live theater helpful to him after his military service ended, because it helped him to articulate his feelings and reduce his feelings of aggression by allowing him to put words to his experiences in a way that was lacking in the military.

When Crowe was chosen by director Timothy Kennedy to play the title role in “Annie Get Your Gun,” it made for an irresistibly cute casting twist, at first. After all, no one would have to tell a highly trained Marine Sergeant how Annie Oakley would handle her rifle. But that all turned deadly serious on Wednesday as the cast and crew of nearly 40, ranging in age from 9 to 70, began to process the unthinkable news that three students had just been shot at school. 

Suddenly, all of them find themselves “outside the wire.”

There will come the solace that comes from performing again, but that won’t happen this weekend. Ovation West Executive Director Graham Anduri met Thursday with a trauma counselor who worked with survivors of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, and he has since decided to pause the run of “Annie Get Your Gun” for a week.

The show is expected to resume Sept. 18 and close Sept. 28, as scheduled, but nothing is definite. “Given the nature of the show, the board and staff of Ovation West will be assessing how and whether to move forward with the remaining performances of the production,” Anduri wrote on the company’s website on Thursday. “More information will be forthcoming early next week.”

Anduri plans to retain a local counselor to meet with the cast and crew at a private gathering this weekend. The staging contains some necessary gunfire – understandable given the story – but if the production continues, further decisions will be made in the coming days to reduce potential trauma to audiences or performers.

I asked Crowe what she might say to a young cast member who should come to her for guidance in her role as both the leading actor in the musical and a real-life combat veteran.

“Oh, man, that is a hard question,” she said. “But I think I would tell them, as a veteran, this is why things need to change.”

“Because when Annie Oakley and all these Wild West people had these guns, they were using them for different things. They were protecting their cattle. They were finding food for their families. Back then, it took two minutes to prepare a musket to fire one round. But all of those things have changed, and our bills and our amendments need to change with them. Because what we said in 1775 and ‘76 doesn’t apply anymore,” she added.

Crowe understands the need for the community to take this moment to reflect, but she can’t wait to get back to playing Annie Oakley, the first female superstar in a male-dominated field, because she wears the character like a second skin.

“As she went around the world, all these heads of state ended up loving her despite how rough she was around the edges,” Crowe said. “But I know she had her hard days when not everyone cared to see her. Still, she just held her head high and did what she did best – and that shut them up.

“I did that, too,” she added. “There were many, many … many people who told me to my face: ‘You don’t belong here. We don’t want you here.’ I had men in my own unit tell me, ‘If something goes down, know that I’m protecting you because you’re a Marine – and that’s the only reason. Otherwise, you have no business being here.’

“And I know Annie probably heard that same thing in her day.”

Crowe hopes that those closest to the Evergreen tragedy can see their musical offering as a coping mechanism. “I hope people do what we always do with theater – and that is to use it as an escape and to lift our spirits for a few hours,” she said.

“And I can’t wait to see those kids. They are gems, every single one of them.”

Newly discovering life outside the wire.

John Moore is The Denver Gazette’s senior arts journalist. Email him at john.moore@gazette.com

ANNIE GET YOUR GUN

• What: Musical presented by Ovation West
• When: Paused through the weekend. Resumes Sept. 18-28
• Times: 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 4:30 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays
• Where: Center Stage, 27608 Fireweed Drive, Evergreen
• Tickets: $24-$36 ($20 on Fridays)
• Info: 303-674-4002 or ovationwest.org