Camden Factor’s HE SAID, SHE SAID Features in FronteraFest’s Best of Fest

After being selected Best of Week, Camden Factor’s original drama He Said, She Said is now featured in Austin’s renowned theatre festival FronteraFest’s Best of Fest this week, moving from a lean, student-led production into one of the festival’s top showcase slots.

Factor — an 11th-grade student at Austin’s Liberal Arts and Science Academy — serves as playwright, director, and producer, bringing to the stage a work she has been shaping for years as part of a long-term goal: lead a full production from page to performance. What began as a small, tightly mounted new play has become a standout festival run — proof that a precise story, executed with clarity and discipline, can travel.

He Said, She Said examines how power operates inside teenage relationships — 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 after the headline moment passes, but the consequences remain?

The play’s evolution has been shaped by what Factor has heard teenagers say in real life: first, while living in the United Kingdom, through conversations with girls who had experienced sexual violence; later, after moving to Austin, by noticing a different but equally troubling pattern. In her view, the danger is not only disbelief — it’s the quiet normalization that makes boundary violations feel common, unsurprising, and therefore not worth addressing. That realization sharpened the play’s focus: less about competing narratives, and more about the subtle social systems that can make a violation feel inevitable — and, as a result, excusable.

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.

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.