MPR News Arts Reporter Marianne Combs joins Steve Seel and Jill Riley to talk about arts events that will take you to new mental places.

Safe as Houses — a multisensory experience about life in the post-housing-bubble age that uses song, music, movement, installation, and video. At its core, Safe As Houses is about safety, both real and metaphorical. What does safety look like when everything is in a rapid state of flux, and the truths that used to be self-evident are blurred by information and fogged by nostalgia? Described as a postmodern opera, Safe As Houses runs Thursday, Sept. 4, to Saturday, Sept. 6, at the New Century Theatre in Minneapolis.

The Tempest on Franconia Island — Shakespeare's epic tale of love, magic and forgiveness comes alive at Franconia Sculpture Park. Twin Cities theatre stalwarts Harry Waters, Jr. and Barbra Berlovitz team up to co-direct a racially diverse cast in William Shakespeare's The Tempest, an epic tale of love, magic and forgiveness, staged in and among the sculptures at Franconia Sculpture Park. Performances run Sept. 4, 5 and 6 at Franconia Sculpture Park in Shafer, Minn., which is located in the St. Croix River Valley region of east central Minnesota.

The Bindery Projects — The Bindery Projects, an alternative artist-run exhibition space located on Vandalia Street near University Avenue in St. Paul, is presenting Patrick Killoran's Schattenhändler, the first exhibition to focus on Killoran's ongoing inventory of shadows. Killoran has spent the past seven years purchasing shadows, linking supernatural imagery with the act of commodity exchange. Schattenhändler consists of a series of "portfolios" containing bills of sale that fold out into rubber cutouts of the seller's shadow. Killoran draws on this same language and juxtaposes it to the contemporary realities of late capitalism. More information can be found on The Bindery Projects' Facebook page.

Marianne Combs joins The Current's Morning Show for the Weekend Arts Roundup every Thursday at 8:30 a.m. Read about all the latest arts news at the State of the Arts blog at mprnews.org.