Mesa Arts Center is a genuine cultural heavyweight: five theatres, four art galleries, and a sprawling courtyard plaza in the heart of downtown. The complex covers seven acres, making it the largest arts campus in Arizona, and it pulls a programme broad enough to serve both the local community and visitors looking for serious performance.
The galleries show rotating exhibitions of contemporary and regional art; the outdoor public art installations are worth a slow circuit of the campus on their own. The main theatre hosts touring Broadway productions, while the smaller spaces run comedy, dance, and local theatre. The exterior architecture — all desert-hued concrete and angular shade structures — makes the building itself worth a look even if you are not going in.
Check the calendar before arriving. There is usually something interesting on, and evening performances in the open-air plaza during the cooler months are a highlight of the Mesa social calendar.