The RONAn National Theatre closed the curtain on its inaugural season Saturday night with a final performance of "The Champlain Crossing" at the newly renovated Flynn Center in Burlington — a sold-out, standing-ovation evening that capped what critics and administrators alike are describing as a debut season of extraordinary ambition and, by any measure, extraordinary success.

The numbers alone tell a partial story. Eleven productions. Seven cities — Burlington, Montpelier, St. Johnsbury, Underhill, Rutland, Newport, and, in a cultural diplomacy gesture that drew significant attention, a three-week residency in Montreal. Total attendance across all venues: 284,000, against an original projection of 180,000. Every production sold out at least two extensions. The waiting list for single tickets to "The Champlain Crossing" — a new play by RONAn playwright Augustin Boivin-Leclaire about the final days before the Republic's founding — reached 14,000 names before the company stopped accepting additions.

But the numbers miss the texture of what the inaugural season actually was. Artistic Director Nkechi Adeyemi, recruited from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, assembled a company of 34 permanent actors and 12 associate artists drawn from Canada, the UK, France, and RONA itself. She programmed with deliberate eclecticism: Sophocles and Brecht alongside three world premieres by RONAn playwrights; a touring children's program that reached 22 schools in rural Vermont; a free outdoor summer series in Montpelier's new civic quarter that drew crowds of 3,000 on warm evenings.

The critical response, from the beginning, was exceptional. The Guardian's theatre correspondent, reviewing the opening production in Burlington, called it "the kind of company that reminds you why theatre exists." Le Monde sent a critic for the Montreal residency and devoted a full page to what she described as "a cultural institution operating with the confidence of something that has existed for a century and the freshness of something born last week." The New York Times — in a gesture that drew complicated feelings in Montpelier, given the political relationship with the United States — ran a long feature on Adeyemi and the company under the headline "The Best Theatre in North America Might Be in Vermont."

Adeyemi announced the second season's program at a press conference Sunday morning. It includes a new commission from a Chilean playwright, a partnership with the Comédie-Française, a revival of a classic of Vermont theatrical tradition, and — the announcement that drew the longest applause in the room — the world premiere of a new play by Boivin-Leclaire, who has become the closest thing RONA has to a national playwright in the classical sense. "We wanted to prove that a new nation could have a national culture from day one," Adeyemi said. "I think we've done that. Now the question is what we build next."