The response was a bit overwhelming, even for an actor, but Terence Knapp understood the connection when people stared at him from across the street and made the sign of the cross.

He knew when they shook his hand after a performance or simply on the streets of Honolulu, that sometimes it wasn't really his hand they were holding.

And he accepted the good-natured belief of a friend — a nun — that he was almost a split personality.

Of all the parts the actor has played, Knapp identifies most with Father Damien, the Catholic priest whose devotion to the Hansen's disease patients on Moloka'i led to sainthood, conferred on Damien today at the Vatican.

Knapp's role in "Damien," the dramatic monologue by Aldyth Morris, has defined the actor ever since he first presented it at Kennedy Theatre in 1976.

Tonight, PBS Hawaii revives its 1977 broadcast version of "Damien," which stars Knapp. PBS stations across the country also plan to air it, as they did in 1978.

Father Damien moved those who have discovered his story, just as the broadcast version and its stage cousin moved those who worked on it. Knapp is the common thread.

"There are some other actors who do the same thing, but it is very different," said the Rev. Lane Akiona, pastor at St. Augustine Catholic Church in Waikiki. "Terence, for many of us, is that image of Damien. And because he has done it for so long, when we want to see Damien today, he is the one."

Knapp, now 78, is thrilled at the PBS revival. Bringing Father Damien to life has been the greatest, most enduring experience of his career.

"I cannot throw off in my mortal life something of the identity of Father Damien," he said. "I created it for the public and it hasn't left me. It has never left me. It is something I know to be a part of my existence."

RAGE AND PASSION

It's easy to see why. In addition to successful runs at Kennedy and the several weeks sequestered in the public television studio, Knapp has performed "Damien" on every island except Ni'ihau. He's marched in religious and civic parades and boomed his voice from the steps of Honolulu Hale.

He even stood in a community hall at St. Philomena, the Kalaupapa church that Damien built, and performed as Morris, then 75, watched from a doorway. Kalaupapa's Hansen's disease patients had been brought to the hall in wheelchairs and, in some cases, their own beds.

Afterward, he was surrounded by the patients.

"They came at me and they mobbed me and they touched me and they hugged me and they gave me a lei made of Job's tears," Knapp said. "I was very overcome."

Knapp grew up "a cradle-born Catholic" in London and Dublin. His earliest memory of Damien comes from his days as an altar boy. Knapp was about 12 when he found a book at church about the Belgian priest. He still has it.

His roots as an actor go back to post-World War II London, where he graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and worked in the Merseyside Playhouse with Sir Laurence Olivier, who became a mentor and father figure to Knapp. Knapp had performed around the world by the time he arrived in Islands in 1970 to teach acting at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa and direct plays at Kennedy.

He teamed with Morris to create "Damien" after the playwright was "knocked sideways" by the power of the one-man production "Darrow," the story of U.S. attorney Clarence Darrow. Morris, an editor at the University of Hawai'i Press and a local playwright, had spent 40 years researching the life of Damien. She had seen his koa casket paraded through Honolulu after the Belgian government asked that it be exhumed and shipped to his homeland in 1936.

The monologue created by Morris and Knapp reveals the priest as a complex man struggling with his flawed humanity and his devotion to the patients of Kalaupapa. It presents Damien as a spirit who discusses his life while watching his own funeral procession. One theater critic said the climax is so filled with rage and passion that audiences would feel they had "witnessed the making of a saint."

The broadcast version of "Damien" came together as a rare and beautiful project, but creating it was far from easy, said Mary Bitterman, who at the time was executive director of what was then known as Hawaii Public Television.

'IN A BLACK LIMBO'

When Morris and her husband, Ray, visited Hawaii Public Television's offices in 1977 and pitched the idea of putting the drama on television, Bitterman had not seen the stage version of "Damien" — but she read the script and was immediately impressed.

"It was the most exquisite piece of writing you can imagine," she said. "It has a profound and profane aspect to it. It is not a Pollyanna thing. It's real. It has raw moments to it."

The project not only required special care to create, it also required $126,565 in state funding, corporate donations and in-kind donations.

To help Knapp stay focused, the station also rented an apartment in Waikiki, well away from his routine as a professor.

"I think when you are the single actor in a very demanding play, you need quiet time in which to prepare yourself every day to go on set again," Bitterman said.

Filming began in May 1977 and for those involved, it felt as if they had been dropped into an ink well. The production crew worked for nearly six weeks in a windowless set with black walls and floors.

"It was incredibly tiring and it was very demanding of the very best skills of everyone," Bitterman said. "There were moments when tempers flared and people faced exhaustion. There was never a moment that was simple or calm."

The man behind the camera for every inch of videotape was Wade Couvillon III, a former Marine who served as the station's crew chief and senior cameraman.

"We were in that studio forever," Couvillon said. "If you've never worked in a black limbo, which is what that was — you come out looking like a pink-eyed rabbit at the end of the day."

The project was intense and director Nino J. Martin a perfectionist, said Couvillon, now 62 and retired.

"Nino was an extremely talented director who I think was one of the few people who could pull that off," Couvillon said. "He expected a lot and if you didn't get it, he would bury you until you did. We did 29 takes on one scene that I kept telling him couldn't get any better."

Martin, who hosted a cooking show at the station, chose to shoot "Damien" with a single camera, then edit the sequences into a seamless presentation.

Tightly choreographed, "Damien" was shot with four sparse sets, including one with a towering, 14-foot sculpted crucifix. But the studio only had enough room to create one set at a time. Consequently, all sequences for a particular set were shot before the set was dismantled, regardless of where they were in the script.

SAINT'S IRON NAIL

Throughout, Couvillon felt a connection to Knapp.

"I always got the impression that Terry was playing more to me because I was the only one there looking through the view finder," he said.

Their time in the black studio — an air-conditioned chill box that Couvillon called "a meat locker" — nonetheless took a toll.

"The circumstances were just horrendous," he said. "We all came out of that studio sick. I had a raging fever the last day."

But the finished product was "a moving jolt of television," Couvillon said. Critics across the country praised "Damien," which went on to win the prestigious George Foster Peabody Award.

For all that Knapp has done to give the modern world a bridge to Damien, the actor has his own tie to the priest — a simple iron nail, 130 years old at least, once held by the Belgian as he hammered it into St. Philomena Church. It was a gift from the late Richard Marks, who spent most of his life at Kalaupapa after contracting Hansen's disease as a boy.

Knapp keeps the nail in a polished koa box in his Mo'ili'ili apartment, along with what remains of the lei of Job's tears.

To hold it, weathered as his own creased fingers, stirs the actor. When Knapp placed it in the hands of a dying friend earlier this year, his friend wouldn't let it go. When he showed it to a film crew from PBS Hawaii, they told him it felt warm.

"That came to me for a purpose, but what that purpose is, I don't know," Knapp said, as if everything in life must have an answer. "And there is a sense of being in connection with the great man. That's all there is to it. I have a sense of nearness that I wouldn't ordinarily have."