SOURCE: Pickar, Gertrud Bauer. “Hades Revisited: Max Frisch's Triptychon.” German Quarterly 59, no. 1 (winter 1986): 52-64.

In the following essay, Pickar compares Triptychon to Nun singen sie wieder and Thornton Wilder's Our Town in order to illuminate Frisch's thematic and structural concerns.

Since the publication of Santa Cruz in 1944, Max Frisch has written and published ten additional works for the stage. Their study reveals both the ebb and flow of his thematic concerns and his enduring interest in the nature and ramifications of man's propensity to make images of himself and his fellow men. Unmistakable, too, are his continued experimentation with dramatic form and structure and the progressive development of his own unique form of narrative drama with its manipulation of time, place, and reality.

Frisch's interest in probing the bounds of dramatic form can be attributed at least in part to the impact of Thornton Wilder's plays Our Town...