It takes a talented actor to play two twins in one play, and IVCC found that talent in Alexis Trammel. In the school’s spring musical “Disaster!,”

Trammel will be playing the roles of Lisa and Ben, the children of a ditsy songstress named Jackie, who is played by Ashley Hurst.

But while this role will take rigorous planning onstage, offstage and in rehearsal, Trammel is no stranger to precise scheduling because for her first semester at IVCC and her last semester of high school, she was a full-time student in both schools.

Her high school senior year was supposed to go just as any other nursing student’s year had gone before. She would take Ottawa Township High School’s CNA class, which would take up two hours out of her day, and then continue on just like any other teenager. But since the CNA teacher had just resigned the summer before Trammel was supposed to start the class, she and her peers were forced into a 13-hour school day.

Some students were allowed to transfer to La Salle-Peru High School’s program, while the last students to be accepted into the CNA class were made to take the night program at IVCC’s Ottawa campus. The only relief they were offered was a study hall in the last hour of the day, which they would use to make their way to IVCC’s Ottawa Center.

Trammel recalled, “Doing the CNA program while I was also in high school was… so difficult.”

Not only did she have a 13-hour school day, but homework and readying herself for the day stretched her waking hours to 17. However, where she used to wake up at 6:30 in the morning to go to sleep at 11:30 at night last semester, she now has the luxury of a two- to three-hour school day as a full-time college student.

Although, what Trammel missed most was not free-time but performance. She said, “I’m just looking forward to doing theatre again because I had to not do the play [at OTHS] because I had to do the CNA program,… so I didn’t get to do my last play in high school, and that was really depressing.”

Because of her experience with the OTHS plays and musicals, even when she had a normal high school schedule, Trammel still knew something about long days when she held lead roles in the theatre productions.

As Maria, the starring role in “The Sound of Music,” between rehearsals, school days, homework and line memorization, her days were sometimes just as long as they were in the CNA program.

So a schedule of learning lines and juggling school work is nothing new to Trammel.

Costar, Lindsay Wheeler, who plays the part of Marianne in “Disaster!,” said, “Since I’ve met Alexis, she has always been a hardworking student… I always knew that she was an outstanding performer for the stage, and now at IVCC, she’s off to a great start, and she is really going to get the chance to shine.”

And Trammel, along with the rest of the cast, will get that chance to shine April 19-22 and 26-28 when they perform “Disaster!” in the Dr. Mary Margaret Weeg Cultural Center.