But despite much that is familiar, much is not.
Many of the actors speak Afrikaans, Xhosa (the "x" is pronounced as a click) or Zulu, and many of the shows fluidly shift between those languages with the ease of a multicultural, multilingual country with 11 official languages.
Outside Grahamstown are immense game reserves where lions and elephants and rhinos and giraffes and zebras and the hilarious warthogs roam the savannahs.
But the most pronounced difference is this festival's commitment to the principle that art's purpose is singular: to change the world.
In service of that idea, words such as tshepong (hope), imbumba (collaboration) and ubuntu, meaning something like common humanity, echo through performances and conversations. Apartheid, the government policy of racial segregation that made South Africa a pariah in the civilized world until 1994, is still on everyone's lips.
South African dramas wallow in collective guilt and collective rage; the longing for "truth and reconciliation" (as the post-apartheid commission was titled), the hope that revenge can be replaced with restorative justice, was the underlying theme of every South African play I saw at the festival, which was held June 26-July 5.
Play after play (as well as lecture after lecture, painting after photograph), whether satirical or sentimental, conventional or experimental, involved the same sociopolitical themes: the violence of racism, the violence of sexism, and the horror of HIV/AIDS in Africa.
