Stephen Karam’s claustrophobic family drama “The Humans” takes place in what, to a non-New Yorker, might resemble the most terrifying and uninhabitable apartment on the market: The paint’s peeling, light fixtures dangle precariously from the ceiling, and the only natural light seeps in through dirty windows looking out on the most depressing airshaft of all time.
It makes Catherine Deneuve’s flat in “Repulsion” look like a luxury condo.But the two-story, ground-level duplex is actually a pretty cush Lower East Side unit, and for Karam, who wrote and directed the film from his own 2016 play, it’s not so bad.
That’s because he more or less lived in this place during his starving-artist days in New York City.“The reason I was able to afford it as a playwright [with a] day job working as an assistant [was because] I lived in the basement.
My roommate lived on the ground floor.
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