"All drama is about lies," writer David Mamet has said. His play "Race," which opened on Friday at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, makes that point vividly as it takes on two topics Americans lie about all the time: Sex and skin color.

Reveling in harsh, muscular language that practically blisters your ears, "Race" takes place in a sleek law office where partners Jack Lawson (Jeff Talbott), who is white, and Henry Brown (Morocco Omari), who is black, have to decide how to handle a potential client. A WASP of aristocratic bearing and vast fortune who has been charged with the rape of a young black woman, Charles Strickland (Mark Elliot Wilson) insists on his innocence — not because he's the wrong man but because, he contends, the sex was consensual.

Strickland wants the partners to defend him. But should they? The partners debate the situation it not only with each other and with Strickland but also with young lawyer who works for them, Susan (Zooey Martinson). She's black, too.

Director Timothy Near lets her poised cast hurtle through two short acts in a welter of sharp-edged words. But we can't trust any of them. As Brown points out, nobody has said no to Strickland in decades. Was the rape victim really an exception? Will they be?

Mamet is almost as well-known for his conservative political opinions as for his astonishingly rough language, but "Race" is no harangue. It's a musing on the bleak prospects of honesty, even when that's supposedly what you're trying to find. Everybody has secrets they will take pains to cover up; sensitive subjects are, as Lawson says, where those secrets dwell. The very rough language he and others use to talk about sex and race supposedly strips away the polite discourse that keeps secrets safe.

But these characters can lie through anything, right up to the play's last moments. (It would be intriguing if Mamet had included one more scene between the long-time partners Lawson and Brown, one to reveal what they really think of each other.) In this world, honesty isn't anybody's first choice — and, obviously, this world isn't only on stage.

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"Race"

When Through March 4 • Where Browning Mainstage, Loretto-Hilton Center, 130 Edgar Road • How much $16-$72 • More info 314-968-4925; repstl.org