Our Mission
Camden Factor, a junior at Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy (LASA), will premiere her original drama He Said, She Said at FronteraFest in January 2026. Serving as playwright, director, and producer, Factor brings a bold new work to the stage—one she has been shaping for years as part of a long-term personal goal to lead a full production from page to performance.
He Said, She Said examines how power operates inside teenage relationships, with particular attention to how young men can absorb harmful cultural messaging and how young women may be pressured to minimize boundary-crossing behavior. Grounded in contemporary dialogue and social dynamics, the play asks an urgent question: what does accountability look like in high school when consent is violated—and how do peers, partners, and communities respond when the “headline moment” passes but the consequences remain?At He Said She Said, our mission is to provide education and resources to support mental health and wellness in our community.
A Story Shaped by Listening, Then Rewritten for Austin
Factor began writing the play four years ago while living in the United Kingdom, after encounters that made a lasting impression on her—particularly conversations with girls who had experienced sexual violence. What stayed with her was not only the harm itself, but the patterns around it: the social fallout, the normalization, and the ways repeated boundary violations could be dismissed as “misunderstandings.” Those early observations sparked a commitment to write something that would make teenagers more alert to risk, more fluent in boundaries, and more honest about the emotional and social mechanisms that allow violations to persist.
The earliest draft emerged during the height of public conversation around #MeToo, when many teenagers were debating consent, credibility, and reputational fear. Factor recalls a climate in which some boys worried about false accusations even as norms were rapidly shifting and many girls’ accounts were still doubted or rationalized away.
When Factor moved to Austin, she found a different atmosphere—less defined by disbelief than by fatigue and normalization. In her view, the more troubling pattern is not that peers fail to believe what happened, but that they often treat it as common, unsurprising, and therefore not worth addressing. That realization reshaped the play’s focus: He Said, She Said became less about competing narratives and more about the quiet social systems that can make a violation feel inevitable—and, as a result, excusable.
Casting Young Artists to Keep the World on Stage Credible
Set among a 16-year-old girl, her 17-year-old boyfriend, and his friends, He Said, She Said traces how a single transgression reverberates through a peer group: what gets justified, what gets minimized, what gets condemned, and what gets ignored. To keep the production anchored in the lived reality of teenagers, Factor cast young performers, including acting students from The University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Theatre and Dance in three of the four roles. Jason Robalino plays the boyfriend at the center of the conflict, opposite Sofia Spanhel. UT Theatre students Max Cheng and Isaiah Jones portray friends whose sharply different reactions expose the moral fault lines in the group.
Beyond “Consent Education”: Accountability, Repair, and a Way Forward
Factor’s intent is not simply to restate the importance of consent—she argues that most teens already know the vocabulary. Instead, the play interrogates what happens next: What consequences are socially enforced? Who bears the cost? What does repair require? And how can communities respond in ways that support girls’ recovery without treating boys as disposable—while still taking harm seriously?
In parallel with the stage production, Factor is adapting He Said, She Said into a short film—using the same Austin-based cast—aimed at film festivals and potential classroom distribution. Her longer-term goal is to create work that is both artistically rigorous and practically useful: a realistic, compassionate resource that helps teenagers recognize danger, set boundaries, respond appropriately when harm occurs, and understand what accountability should demand.
He Said, She Said premieres at FronteraFest (January 2026) in Austin. The play contains mature themes and is intended to prompt thoughtful conversation among students, parents, and educators about consent, culture, and responsibility in adolescent life.