Your Weekend Outlook: A Whirlwind

Why go see one artist when you can see the work of 500? Art-a-Whirl, billed as the largest open studio and gallery tour in the United States, is back this Friday through Sunday in Northeast Minneapolis. No matter what your interest - pottery, painting, posters, music, rugs, whatever - you're bound to find something you like at this event.

What if you could visit yourself in the past? What advice would you give yourself? Or would it be better to not know the future? Walking Shadow Theater Company presents The Transdimensional Couriers Union, a science fiction adventure of love, technology, and betrayal in which Sophie must choose whether to repair her relationship, or time itself. At the Peoples Center Theatre in Minneapolis through May 29.

Marinetti and Mayakovsky were both futurist poets, and they both thought industry and fast cars were pretty much the heights of human achievement. Theatre Novi Most, inspired by a meeting of the two men, have taken their life stories and their letters to create a theatrical tale filled with physical poetry. At Open Eye Figure Theatre through May 23.

Artist Sonja Peterson finds similarities between explorers of old, with their borderline insane passions for discovery, and the financial wizards of today, creating new revenue streams out of seeming thin-air. Peterson explores the intersection between the wilds of undiscovered territories, and the wilds of the modern economic engine, with detailed, intricate works in paper and glass. At the Burnet Gallery in the Le Meridien Chambers art hotel in Minneapolis, starting

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Urban Samurai Productions presents "Bright Ideas," a darkly comic look at just what parents are willing to do to get their kid into the right... preschool. Billed as an exploration of "the impact that our hyper-competitive cutthroat culture has on the modern family." At Sabes Jewish Community Center through May 23.

Stevens Square Center for the Arts presents a tribute to the golden age of American vaudeville and amusement parks with "Escape from Coney Island." The birthplace of the hot dog and the rollercoaster, Coney Island holds an important place in American history, and some credit it with the birth of popular culture (and really, how far flung is reality television from a good old freak show?). Eight artists present work inspired by the bizarre peninsula/playground, through June 6.

So what are you doing this weekend?

• After five years, State of the Arts comes to a close
• Park Square’s second stage to open Friday
• Most critics find ‘Romeo and Juliet’ a dreamy delight
• Michael Kareken fills two galleries with ‘Parts’