By RAVI SOMAIYA


The evening usually starts with an unmarked door, poorly lighted stairs and a familiar popping sound.

Table tennis.

Wally Green, 29, from a public housing project in the Coney Island neighborhood of New York City, picked up the game after losing money to pool hall hustlers. Susan Sarandon, the actress, discovered the game through her son Miles, 16. She and Mr.Green find themselves at the same events sometimes.

“There was no table tennis over there,”Mr.Green said of his housing project.“There was a lot of bullets going over, but no table tennis.”

Ms.Sarandon was not running from pool hustlers or bullets when she became interested in the game.“I started finding out that there was this subculture of Ping-Pong and all these people that you wouldn’t expect are serious about it,”she said.“I just worked with Ed Norton, and he’s so committed that he trained in China while he was shooting a film there.”

Mr.Green and Ms.Sarandon are part of a growing number of players in New York City and beyond who are brought together by their fervent love for the game - known generically as table tennis but often called Ping-Pong (a trademark) by its devotees.

USA Table Tennis, the sport’s national organizing body in the United States, said it has had a steady increase in membership of just below 10 percent since 2006. There are 457 Yahoo groups related to the sport, including ones for collegiate players and regional groups of about 500 members.

Theories on the appeal of the game, which started in England at the end of the 19th century as an after-dinner amusement, include its fast pace, the unique sounds , its health benefits and, paradoxically, the fact that you can play while drinking or smoking.

“The matches aren’t that long, so they get very emotional very fast and then they’re over,”Ms.Sarandon said.“You can come and go as you please and still feel satisfied.”

Marty Reisman, 78, has been a professional table tennis player since he was 11 and played for nickels and dimes during the Great Depression.

Mr.Reisman has seen celebrities come and go. He said he played with the track star Jesse Owens as a young man and with the actor Matthew Broderick in the 1980s. And he has seen the game rise like this before, too.

“Ping-Pong is a game that I think really thrives during tough times,” he said, referring to the 1930s and ‘40s.“It’s easy to play and it’s cheap to play, and it seems that historically every time it’s really thrived has been a time of depression.”