The dramatic action [of Triptychon], such as it is, consists of a funeral during the first tableau, a series of conversations in Hades during the second one, and a conversation on a park bench in Paris between a couple of lovers (one alive, one dead) during the last one. The innovative device which Frisch uses to propel his "action" and to advance his thesis is to have dead and living characters intermingle and even speak to each other. The dead retain the age which they had at the moment of death; the living continue to grow old. This device results in some comic relief in the second tableau, as when a seventy-year-old son encounters his forty-one-year-old father who scolds him for still not being able to fish properly.

Essentially, though, this is a very serious work. As the eighteen disparate yet related characters confront each other in Hades...