Can The Real Robin Still Stand Up?

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Robin Williams is nervous. He is prowling around backstage at the Chicago Theater, waiting for the curtain to go up in front of a packed house and wondering if he can make the 3,800 people out there laugh. It's the opening show in his first stand-up tour in almost 16 years. He turned 50, "an age when you realize your prostate is bigger than your ego," last July. Can he still carry an audience for nearly two hours on his own, the way he last did in New York City when he was just 35?

Even now--especially now, minutes before show time--he is looking for fresh material. A friend of the promoter's comes backstage wearing a shaggy black coat, and immediately Williams is all over her, making barking noises, "look, she is wearing a poodle," then becoming a haughty French grande dame giving fashion commentary. The woman is taken aback and then starts laughing. The stagehands are laughing. Williams is loosening up the only way he knows how: by cracking other people up.

Onstage he's as manic as ever, sweating by the pint as his body bounds around, trying to keep up with the rapid-fire humor synapses of his brain. His jokes run from nonsensical (wet-burka competitions and "Enron Hubbard, head of the Church of Profitology") to predictable ("We used to pay for powder in little white envelopes"). Comedians who play closer to the edge, like Chris Rock or Andy Dick, make his style seem quaint. But Robin Williams' improv is still an amazing high-wire act. "It's a risk if it doesn't work," he told TIME last month. "But it's a gas. You go out and kick it, and every night you pick up new stuff."

At a half-century, Williams is looking for a lot of new stuff. "When you get to be older, you start to think, What will be your body of work? What will you leave behind?" he says. And his oeuvre is, frankly, spotty. No one can take away Mork & Mindy; Good Morning, Vietnam; or his Oscar for Good Will Hunting. But Williams is a recovering schmaltzaholic, having engaged in a dangerous number of Patch Adams- and Mrs. Doubtfire-type roles. As therapy, apart from performing before 39 live audiences in 26 cities over the next two months, he's beating a woman to death in rural Alaska (in Insomnia, with Al Pacino), plotting the downfall of a TV rival (in Death to Smoochy) and stalking an adulterer, with a carving knife in his backpack (in One Hour Photo). "Those warm, open characters, outsiders who want to help other people--is that part of me? Oh, yeah," says Williams. "But people want to label you as one thing. The idea is to break the label when you do something like One Hour Photo, open the f-stop a little."

In that movie, which drew critical praise at the Sundance Film Festival and will be released in the fall, Williams plays a lonely photo-shop employee who becomes obsessed with a family whose pictures he has developed for years. Filmed in the neon-lit canyons of a supermarket in the manner of a horror movie, it introduces us to a blank-faced and distinctly unfunny Williams. It's a tiny independent film, but the star had to do some persuading to get the part. "I had said I wanted to do something darker," he says. "I met with the director [Mark Romanek], and I think he thought it was some kind of joke."