I wish that I didn’t have to be a critic sometimes.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not sick of the work. I get no greater pleasure than heading to the theater, soaking in the results of months of collaboration, letting the experience percolate and then transforming rambling thoughts into coherent — occasionally incoherent — criticisms during coffee-fueled writing explosions.

The process is as important as the final review. It’s a rush. But sometimes a play comes along that negates the entire shebang. Such is the case of Clybourne Park, currently at Steppenwolf Theater.

I don’t want to review this play. Not because it isn’t good. The exact opposite, in fact. Clybourne Park is the best production I’ve seen in years. I could gush for pages. Doing so, however, would ruin your experience of the play. In a perfect world, the unfamiliar would see Clybourne Park in the same way I did.

I knew nothing about the play other than it won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for drama. I was also nominally aware of a relation to A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic about an African-American family from Chicago’s South Side and the obstacles they encounter when they move into the fictional, all-white neighborhood of Clybourne Park. I was ignorant about the play’s plot, characters and the actors involved — all that.

I had no idea what to expect. What I found was an explosive, powerful, poignant, perfectly acted and often hysterical play set in late-1950s Chicago that, like A Raisin in the Sun, deals with the effects of gentrification and integration — but from another side.

You now know more than I did before seeing Clybourne Park. Adventurous theatergoers: stop reading. Just see it. Trust me. My ignorance made all of the events that transpired absorbing and alive. I’m a critic with a job to do, though, so proceed I must.

Russ and Bev are leaving Clybourne Park for the suburbs. As they pack up their modest bungalow with the help of their black housekeeper, visitors descend. We soon learn that a great tragedy has befallen the couple, instigating their move. We also learn that the family who has purchased the home is black.

The news of potential integration has members of the community up in arms, in particular Karl, who was last seen in A Raisin in the Sun pressuring the black Younger family not to move into his white neighborhood. In Clybourne Park, he’s back to pressure the sellers. The confrontation exposes not only the community’s racism, but also deep familial skeletons. And it rivets with pin-drop intensity.

Act Two jumps ahead 50 years. A group sits in the same house from Act One, but it is now empty and vandalized. A young couple has bought it and they’re meeting with community members and lawyers to review future plans for the property.

The scene parallels much of Act One, but as if through a time-worn funhouse mirror. Clybourne Park is now a predominantly black neighborhood. The home buyers are white. The characters are portrayed by the same players from earlier, as well, which increases the effect.

The discussion that takes place between the initially well-meaning group and its eventual breakdown reveal both the incredible advances and unfortunate stagnation made in race relations and interpersonal communication since the home in Clybourne Park was sold 50 years back.

Playwright Bruce Norris uses raw, uncomfortable, but belly laugh-inducing humor to highlight the situation, though. It’s a brilliant move. The tension-inducing miscommunication and racist jokes — from all sides — are hilarious. But they serve a deeper function, unifying the audience against the very ills that the play exposes.