Three decades ago, Margo Hall walked into an audition for the part of Anita Hill.

The play was “Unquestioned Integrity” by Mame Hunt, being directed at Magic Theatre by Ellen Sebastian Chang, the company’s first director of color. Hall — who’s now one of the most sought-after actors in the region, with a recurring role on “Blindspotting” — was unknown then. It had been a year and a half since she’d moved to the Bay Area from New York, and she hadn’t booked a gig yet.

Chang was thrilled with Hall’s audition but, hyperconscious of colorism, had one concern.

“I said, ‘Anita Hill is much darker than you,’ ” Chang recalled. “And, I’ll never forget, Margo just looked so deep into my eyes and — not defensive — said, ‘If you were thinking about the shade of my color during this performance, then I’m not doing my craft.’ ”

That was it. Hall landed the role, seeding a friendship and professional partnership whose latest flowering, “Josephine’s Feast,” reunites the pair at the Magic and has both thinking about the past.

In San Francisco playwright Star Finch’s world premiere, which begins previews Wednesday, Aug. 2, Hall plays the title character, a Black matriarch who’s celebrating her birthday with a family dinner at which she makes a startling announcement. She still loves them all, but she’s done being defined as a mother, a sister, an aunt.

In a rehearsal of the announcement scene on a recent afternoon, Hall got to this line: “You can be sitting in a restaurant, laughing with your family, and then a song comes on that reminds you of who you were when you sang along to it for the first time. … And for just a flash, you realize that you’re standing on top of that version of yourself — holding her underwater to allow the you in the restaurant to exist.”

The way Hall delivered the line, Josephine is first working through a still-inchoate thought. Then she landed on “who you were,” and that little phrase became fighting words — as if she were trying to eke out a place for that past self and rue its loss at the same time.

For Hall, “Josephine’s Feast” summons her own past selves.

“We’re at an age now where there are so many fragments of our lives,” she said of her and Chang. “When you go through this play, all of that stuff comes up — imagining when I was 10 years old, standing in the living room with a green-velvet little jumpsuit, just owning the world. And you think, ‘Where did that little girl go?’ ”

To her fans, it might seem like Hall still owns the world. She and Chang reminisced about the time more than 15 years ago when they both showed up at Nomad Cafe in North Oakland only to discover they were interviewing for the same job: directing“Bulrusher”for Shotgun Players. Playwright Eisa Davis had specified that only a Black woman could direct the show.

“We looked at each other, and we said, ‘Let’s make a strategy,’ ” Chang said. They decided to walk into their interviews together, negotiating to co-direct, with each getting her own full fee, not splitting one person’s rate halfway. They succeeded, Shotgun Managing Director Liz Lisle confirmed. (Berkeley Rep is set to produce the play this year.)

But in Josephine’s case in the new play, there’s no negotiating anymore. “Do you have any idea how tired I am of negotiating with my captors?” she asks her family in the script.

霍尔和Chang的孩子长大side, with sleepovers at each other’s houses, relate to that moment. They recall calling each other, fuming, “When my kid turns 18, I’m outta here!”

“She loves her family profoundly,” Chang said of Josephine. “But for her to continue to be that overarching guidance of motherhood — if she doesn’t go, she will just disappear, and there’ll be no love. There will just be the empty role of endless parenting.”

Hall added, “Our children don’t see us. They have no idea.”

She recalled letting it sink in, later in life, that her own mother was 40 years old once. “She was living her life. She was enjoying her relationship with my stepfather. But all I saw was, ‘When are you cooking dinner, and are you going to come and see me in a play? ’ ”

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com