Hrmmm ... I've tried something along these lines:
$ALPHA$ action
$ALPHA action$
'$ALPHA$ action'
'$ALPHA action$'
'$ALPHA$' action
inside of every evar group I can think of, but I can't get it to work. It seems to me, litestep actually looks for whatever you have in your evar as an entire program name. Fine, so I try it when it's called using similar syntax. Then it looks for your program name as a variable plus your quoted characters added to it. That amounts to the same thing.

This may not be possible to do with litestep.