I skipped the season finale of Lost the other night in favor of another supernatural tale of attractive people haunted by their pasts who just want to get off the damn island. The Folger’s latest staging of The Tempest is a light, spritely, fleet-footed thing of a play, apropos for a show about forgiveness and renewal and the casting off of old follies. Like the shipwreck that opens Act I, it’s forceful and bewildering and seemingly over so fast you walk out unsure whether or not you’ve just seen it at all; its weightlessness is the best and worst thing about it.

The last time we saw The Tempest ‘round these parts, in a Shakespeare Theatre production, it had gone all Miss Saigon on us. They had a very real looking ship onstage and Ariel spent the show in a flying harness. I remember being so impressed by the actor’s ability to sing for two hours while inverted like Gene Simmons that I can no longer remember whether his performance was any good.

Fortunately, this version of Shakespeare’s farewell to the “rough magic” of playwriting is more a garage-band affair. Save for some Eye-of-Sauron-style surround-sound-and-fury when Ariel (a headset-miked Marybeth Frtizky) has to scare the shipwrecked visitors into behaving themselves, this is modest production by Folger standards.

Tony Cisek’s set is comprised by six discs of various heights and sizes, one of which serves as the backdrop behind which Ariel spends the show imprisoned (a problem, since we can’t see her). Within these circles is a pattern suggestive of gearworks or the innards of a clock; a sly emblem of the fact that Prospero, the deposed ruler-cum-sorcerer at the center of the tale, is a man whose powers both of wizardry and of judgment, while remarkable, have their limitations.

And make no mistake about it — this is "The Prospero Show," for better or for worse. Michael Rudko is never less than watchable in the part, though his performance does emphasize the benevolent, paternal aspect of the character, at the expense of the bitterness against which the exiled wizard struggles. His brother, Antonio, overthrew him as Duke of Milan and left him and his daughter to die at sea. Is he not at least a little bit, you know, pissed, even after 12 years?

This Tempest comes to us from the directorial hand of Aaron Posner, maestro of last year’s superb Measure for Measure. That show won a mantel full of Helen Hayes awards, at least in part for refusing to shrink from the material’s innate schizophrenia, especially its famously unconvincing “happy” ending. (Also, it had puppets.) Without giving the game away, I’ll say that, although this show never quite transports us the way his Measure did, Posner does find a clever way to graft some of the menace that’s missing from Rudko’s Prospero onto Todd Schofield’s Caliban. Painted with ash and garbed in what looks like a rotting straitjacket, Scofield makes us pity and fear him at the same time. Meanwhile, as young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand, Erin Weaver and Mikaal Sulaiman make a winning pair, and Jim Zidar has avuncular gravitas to spare in the role of Gonzalo.

Because Shakespeare wrote this, by most accounts his final play, within a couple of years of the founding of the British settlement at Jamestown, people like to look to it for representations of colonialism and exploitation. The only overt nod to that idea here comes from Kate Turner-Walker’s costumes for Anotonio, Sebastian, Alonso, and Gonzalo, which evoke the late 19th century. The mens’ long coats, vests, canes and bowlers make them look — Alonso’s royal sash notwithstanding — like railroad barons. It makes for a striking visual clash between these diplomatic schemers, who plot murder even before they’ve figured out how they’re getting home, and the endlessly forgiving, granola-chic Prospero, lending a melancholy edge to the happy ending. After all, it wasn’t the benign, bookish types who ended up ruling the New World, now was it?

The Tempest is at the Folger Shakespeare Library through June 17. Tickets are available online.