Damien debuted on Hawaiʻi Public Television on September 29, 1977. The one-man play, written by Aldyth Morris, featured actor Terence Knapp as Father Damien De Veuster, the Belgian priest who cared for and ministered to Hansen’s disease patients at Kalaupapa, Molokaʻi. The film played nationally on PBS in 1978 and won a prestigious Peabody Award. The story is set in 1936 when the body of Father Damien was exhumed from his grave at Kalaupapa and sent back to his home country of Belgium. Morris was in Honolulu and saw the koa casket carrying Damien’s body as it came through. The play is a monologue delivered by Damien as a spirit watching his own funeral procession and unfolds in a series of flashbacks about his life, his frailties and his devotion to the patients he tended.

Air Date: Thu, May 14, 2026 9:00 PM